Currently, 75% of exonerated women were wrongly convicted of a crime that never occurred. Most of these women were caretakers of a loved one who died – a husband who died in his sleep, a loved one who died by suicide, a child who fatally succumbed to a health condition. Stigma and bias, bolstered by junk science, led prosecutors to wrongly believe that these women committed crimes even when there was no criminal act. Now, prosecutors mobilize this same tragic combination of stigma, bias, and junk science to charge and convict pregnant people and new mothers for fetal assault or even murder. Professor Beety’s talk will provide insight to the current debate on wrongful reproductive convictions and draw from our history of women who were wrongly convicted of unintentional miscarriages, accidental deaths, and other fictitious crimes.
SPEAKER
Valena Beety
Robert H. McKinney Professor of Law
Maurer School of Law
Indiana University Bloomington
Valena Elizabeth Beety is a law professor, an innocence litigator, and a former federal prosecutor. Beety served as the Founding Director of the West Virginia Innocence Project, at West Virginia University College of Law, and the Deputy Director of the Academy for Justice, at Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, and Founding Board Member of the Indiana Innocence Project. She has successfully exonerated wrongfully convicted clients, obtained presidential grants of clemency for drug offenses, served as an elected board member of the national Innocence Network, and served as an Appointed Commissioner on the West Virginia Governor’s Indigent Defense Commission.
Beety’s experiences as a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., and as an innocence litigator in Mississippi and West Virginia, shape her research and writing on wrongful convictions, forensic evidence, prosecution, and incarceration. She is the co-editor of The Wrongful Convictions Reader (Carolina Academic Press, 2nd ed., 2023) (with Russell Covey), and author of the award-winning book Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights (Kensington Books, 2022). She is also a co-author of the treatise Scientific Evidence (LexisNexis 6th Ed. 2022) (with Paul C. Giannelli, Edward J. Imwinkelried, Jane Campbell Moriarty, Andrea Roth, & Jennifer Oliva) and the litigation guide Miscarriages of Justice: Litigating Beyond Factual Innocence (Academy for Justice, 2023) (with Karen Newirth & Karen Thompson). Her scholarship has been published by or is forthcoming in, among other publications, the Northwestern University Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, Florida Law Review, and online companions to the University of Chicago Law Review, New York University Law Review, and Emory Law Journal. Her forthcoming book Just Gender: The Law's Ramped Up War on Women, Pregnant People, and Queer Identity (The New Press, forthcoming 2025) uses the examples of innocent women who have spent decades in prison for "no crime convictions" and the strategic use of criminal law to limit the bodily autonomy of and criminalize pregnant women, new mothers, and queer people to argue that the criminal treatment of the most vulnerable endangers the rights of everyone.