Valena Beety
It’s our pleasure to be working with Valena Beety on her forthcoming book, Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity to be published by The New Press on August 4, 2026.
Valena Beety is a law professor, an innocent 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.
Pink Crime:
Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity
Pink Crime draws on devastating real-life cases, Beety exposes how prosecutorial overreach, flawed forensic science, and cultural panic converge—and how fetal personhood laws, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation have dramatically expanded the reach of criminal law. What emerges is a chilling portrait of a legal system that increasingly criminalizes pregnancy outcomes, motherhood, and queer identity itself.
Innocent women and queer people have spent their entire lives in prison due to no-crime wrongful convictions, and now the same machinery is in motion to wrongly convict pregnant people, new mothers, and queer folks. To fight against the strategic use of criminal law by today’s right-wing movement to limit the bodily autonomy of women and queer people, we must understand the broader history of wrongful convictions and especially the wrongful conviction of women.
