Challenging wrongful convictions through AdvocacyWritingTeachingLitigation
Together we can manifest justice.
Books
My experiences as a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., and as an innocence litigator in Mississippi and West Virginia, shape my writing and advocacy on wrongful convictions, forensic evidence, prosecutors and incarceration.
Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights
Drawing on interviews with both innocence advocates and wrongfully convicted women, along with Beety’s own experiences as an expert innocence litigator and a queer woman, Manifesting Justice provides a unique outsider/insider perspective.
The Wrongful Convictions Reader
Fueled by more than 2,000 exonerations of wrongfully convicted men and women, the “innocence revolution” has shaken the criminal justice system to its core. By gathering the leading research, law, and policy analysis into one volume, The Wrongful Convictions Reader explores the core contributing factors to wrongful convictions: false confessions, witness misidentifications, cognitive bias, junk science, police and prosecutorial misconduct, and ineffective assistance of counsel.
Scientific Evidence
Cited by the National Academy of Sciences in its February 2009 report on the nation’s forensic science system as the resource for learning about the latest forensic techniques and scientific concepts used in collecting and evaluating evidence, and by the U.S. Supreme Court in Daubert v. Merrell Dow and Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, Scientific Evidence is authored by the nation’s foremost authorities on the subject.
August 30, 2023
Professor Valena Beety’s Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights won the Gold Medal in Women’s Issues. Since 1997, the Independent Publisher Book Awards have been recognizing the best independently published books each year.
August 29, 2023
Brenda Andrew was sentenced to death in Oklahoma County in 2004 for the murder of her husband. Her crime was not so unique to explain her sentence
May 30, 2023
Each year, the Eric Hoffer Award presents the Montaigne Medal to the most thought-provoking books. These are books that either illuminate, progress, or redirect thought. The Montaigne Medal is given in honor of the great French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who influenced people such as William Shakespeare, René Descartes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Eric Hoffer.