A Milwaukee woman has been jailed for 11 years for killing the man that prosecutors said had sex trafficked her as a teenager.
The sentence, issued on Monday, ends a six-year legal battle for Chrystul Kizer, now 24, who had argued she should be immune from prosecution.
Kizer was charged with reckless homicide for shooting Randall Volar, 34, in 2018 when she was 17. She accepted a plea deal earlier this year to avoid a life sentence.
Volar had been filming his sexual abuse of Kizer for more than a year before he was killed.
Kizer said she met Volar when she was 16, and that the man sexually assaulted her while giving her cash and gifts. She said he also made money by selling her to other men for sex.
In United States law, for most criminal cases that proceed to trial, trial by jury is usually a matter of course as it is a constitutional right under the Sixth Amendment and cannot be waived without certain requirements.
A bench trial is a trial by judge, as opposed to a trial by jury.
With bench trials, the judge plays the role of the jury as finder of fact in addition to making conclusions of law.
, if a defendant is entitled to a jury trial, the trial must be by jury unless the defendant waives a jury trial in writing. In the various state court systems, waiver of jury trial can vary by jurisdiction.
They can just waive it in writing. So tldr, you’re wrong about the role of a judge AND about why we have juries and their role in the judicial system. Which is to be a check toward aristocracy and unfair laws. The jury literally exists specifically to decide guilty, not guilty, or null. That’s why it’s an option.
The ability to waive your right to a jury trial does not change the role of a jury.
Jury’s do not exist to interpret the law according to the vibe of a given case. If they did, obviously Chrystul would’ve gone to trial instead of taking the deal.
If a jury concludes that the defendant is guilty beyond reasonable doubt then they return a guilty verdict, there is no “unless they’re not feeling it” part of the deliberation process.
If a law is unjust, that’s a matter for a democratically elected government to resolve, not 12 randomly selected members of the public.