Featured on – https://blogs.iu.edu/maurerlaw/2023/05/31/incoming-indiana-law-faculty-members-book-honored-with-ippy-other-awards/
Nearly a year to the day since it was published, a book from incoming Indiana University Maurer School of Law faculty member has earned an Independent Publisher Book Award (“IPPY.”)
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.
Released on May 30, 2022, Beety’s book has already won two other prestigious awards—the Montaigne Medal and the Sarton Nonfiction Award—this spring.
“Professor Beety is a tremendous teacher and scholar, and we’re proud to see her important work recognized with a number of awards this spring,” said Indiana Law Dean Christiana Ochoa.
Manifesting Justice focuses on the shocking story of Beety’s client Leigh Stubbs—a young, queer woman in Mississippi, convicted of a horrific crime she did not commit because of her sexual orientation. Beety weaves Stubbs’s harrowing narrative through the broader story of a broken criminal justice system where defendants—including disproportionate numbers of women of color and LGBTQ+ individuals—are convicted due to racism, prejudice, coerced confessions, and false identifications.
Drawing on interviews with both innocence advocates and wrongfully convicted women, along with Beety’s own experiences as an expert litigator and a queer woman, the book provides a unique outsider/insider perspective. Beety expands our notion of justice to include not just people who are factually innocent, but those who are over-charged, pressured into bad plea deals, and over-sentenced. The result is a riveting and timely book that not only advocates for reforming the conviction process—it will transform our very ideas of crime and punishment, what innocence is, and who should be free.
Beety joined the Maurer School of Law in May, bringing her expertise in criminal justice, wrongful convictions, and equality to Bloomington.
Her scholarship is published widely, most notably in the Northwestern Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review, the Ohio State Law Journal, the Florida Law Review and the online companions to the NYU Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Emory Law Journal.
Beety will be discussing Manifesting Justice, the first book to address wrongful convictions of LGBTQ+ people, at Indianapolis bookstore Indy Reads on June 11 at 2 p.m. Beety and fellow Maurer Professor Jennifer Oliva will examine the connections between the recent rise in hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people, legislation against gender-affirming healthcare, and how queer people are vulnerable to being wrongly arrested and wrongly convicted because of their identities.
