"Fair Enough?" - An Interesting Plea Bargaining Case and Discussion

The Sentencing Matters Substack has an interesting piece by Jonathan Wroblewski discussing and examining a particular plea bargain. The piece, entitled Fair Enough? Truth, Justice, and the Case of Chrystul Kizer, can be found here. 

The focus of the article, Chrystul Kizer, was alleged to have shot and killed Randall Volar when she was seventeen years old. According to the piece, Kizer told authorities that Volar had been "sexually abusing and otherwise mistreating her, including by marketing her as a prostitute. She said she shot him as he tried to touch her." After a 2022 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision decided that Kizer could raise an affirmative defense of abuse at trial, the case was resolved through a plea bargain. The bargain resulted in Kizer pleading guilty to one felony count of second-degree reckless homicide. The article explores whether this was a "fair" result, given that the eventual plea did not reflect the facts in the case. 

From the author:

I don’t believe the way Kizer’s case played out was fair enough.  First, law enforcement failed Kizer when Volar was first arrested and allowed to be released to further abuse Kizer and others.  There should be some accountability for that decision.  Second, Kizer had a more-than-plausible case that she was innocent of first-degree intentional homicide under Wisconsin law.  The prosecution had a plausible case that she was guilty of intentional homicide, but with the clear evidence of abuse, it seems that second-degree intentional homicide (based on at least some mitigation for the abuse) was the more appropriate charge.  The prosecution should have amended the charge to second-degree intentional homicide.

But rather than doing this and allowing a jury to resolve the conflict – which itself would have been imperfect – the parties chose to resolve it through a bargain that was fundamentally untruthful.  Whether you believe in her innocence because of the affirmative defense or not, Kizer acted intentionally in killing Volar.  This was not recklessness.

Plea bargaining takes place in the shadow of the sentence that will or might be ultimately imposed.  Here, because of the mandatory life sentence for first-degree intentional homicide under Wisconsin law and because of the prosecutors’ insistence on following through to trial with that charge despite clear evidence of abuse by Volar, Kizer was left with choices that made pleading guilty despite her belief in her innocence a reasonable one.  This is not fair enough.  If the prosecutors had charged second-degree intentional homicide, carrying no mandatory life sentence, I think the choices that Kizer would have faced would have still been difficult, but it would have indeed been fair enough. And if she had been found guilty at trial and sentenced to 11 years imprisonment, I believe that result would have been fair enough.

The full piece and its discussion of the realities of plea bargaining is well worth a read.