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.