Journal of Law & Gender Conference: Professor Valena Beety, Innocence Litigator

Please join the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender as we celebrate our 50th anniversary with our annual conference. As part of our Fall Mini Conference, we are hosting a discussion with Professor Valena Beety, a wrongful conviction attorney and an author on the criminalization of pregnant and queer people. The event will be on November 9th in WCC 1015. Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP for lunch!

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.