From The Appeal: New Book Examines Women and Queer People Convicted for Crimes That Never Occurred
In Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity, Valena Beety examines how women and queer people face punishment for their bodily autonomy and gender.
According to the National Registry of Exonerations, roughly three-quarters of women exonerated after wrongful convictions involve cases where no crime actually occurred—the wrongfully convicted women faced charges for acts of self-defense, stillbirths and miscarriages, or accidental deaths.
Valena Beety’s new book, Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity, examines the connections between junk science and gender bias that fuels these wrongful convictions—a category of cases she calls “Pink Crime.”
“These are criminal cases that are about punishing women and queer people for their bodily autonomy, for their gender, for their gender performance,” Beety told The Appeal. “The criminal legal system is being used to silence people, surveil, punish, and truly erase people who don’t conform.”
Proving innocence in these cases is a particularly Herculean task, says Beety, who has litigated many innocence cases herself and is co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project.
“DNA evidence is very helpful in reversing a conviction because it’s showing it’s not one person who did it, it’s another person,” Beety says.
But if there was no crime, “there was no perpetrator.”
“It requires a completely different framework,” Beety says of no-crime wrongful convictions. “If you have prosecutors and courts in post-conviction that are dead set on, ‘Well, the only way a conviction is reversed is if you have DNA evidence,’ then that misses the majority of women who are in prison and have been wrongly convicted.”
Go to theappeal.org to read my full interview with Valena Beety, and you can order your own copy of Pink Crime here.