A woman miscarries—and is charged with murder. A new mother tests positive for a drug her hospital administered—and loses custody of her newborn. Four women are convicted of horrific crimes against children they never touched, based on junk science and homophobia—and spend nearly twenty years in prison before being exonerated. A queer teenager takes a photo of a child’s diaper rash at work—and is sentenced to 126 years. These cases are not aberrations. They are symptoms of a system that punishes women and queer people not for what they have done, but for who they are.

In the United States, nearly three-quarters of all wrongly convicted women were convicted of crimes that never occurred at all. Valena Beety, co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project and award-winning legal scholar cited by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reveals how ordinary tragedies—a child’s sudden death, a husband who dies in his sleep—are transformed by prosecutors into murders that never happened. These “no crime” convictions disproportionately target women and queer people, whose identities are recast as evidence of guilt through bias, junk science, and entrenched stereotypes.

About the author:

Valena Elizabeth Beety is a law professor, an innocence litigator, and a former federal prosecutor. She is a founding Board Member of the Indiana Innocence Project and the Robert McKinney Professor of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Beety previously 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. 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. Her experiences as a federal prosecutor and as an innocence litigator shape her research and writing on wrongful convictions, forensic evidence, prosecution, and incarceration.