Valena Beety
Valena Beety is a law professor, innocence litigator, and former federal prosecutor who has exonerated the wrongfully convicted, secured presidential grants of clemency, and produced scholarship cited by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Her work centers the women and queer people most targeted by the U.S. criminal legal system. Her newest book, Pink Crime: Fighting the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity (The New Press, 2026), examines how the criminal legal system targets pregnant women, new mothers, and queer people — and explains how when your identity is the crime, innocence is no defense.
347
Oct. 27, 2026
Why The Innocent Go To Prison On False Charges with Valena Beety | 347
Most of us believe that if a case made it to the courtroom, somebody checked the evidence. Valena Beety used to believe that too. She took a job as a federal prosecutor in DC to protect women from violence, and what she saw from the inside sent her to the other side of the courtroom, where she has spent her career fighting wrongful convictions. In this conversation, Bruce sits down with the law professor, founder of the West Virginia Innocence Project, and author of Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity. They dig into what happens when a hospital room turns into a crime scene, why forensic methods many of us grew up trusting on TV were never tested the way real science is, and why it is so much harder to undo a conviction than to win one. These are stories about mothers, queer women, and poor families whose worst day became the start of a criminal case, and about who really gets the benefit of the doubt. If you have ever bi…
Guest: Valena Beety