New Book Examines Women and Queer People Convicted for Crimes That Never Occurred

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.”

Below is our interview with Beety about Pink Crime. The interview has been edited for clarity. 

The Appeal: You write, “Protecting the innocent and exemplary person does not shrink the carceral state; it only fortifies it.” Could you elaborate on what that means?

Valena Beety: This goes back to the idea of the perfect victim, which has worked against women and queer people for decades. You have survivors of domestic violence who fought back against their attacker, and they instead are the ones who are criminalized. Or you survive domestic violence or sexual violence, and you’re a sex worker, and you’re criminalized because of that. Or you call the police from your home, and your children are there, and the police come, and you’re charged with child neglect for failing to protect your children from your abusive partner. This is all tied to a perfect victim, a perfect survivor. To be that perfect victim as a woman, as a queer person, it’s about performing gender and performing gender well enough to be sympathetic—that you are worthy of help instead of punishment. 

The Appeal: You write about how junk science intersects with pink crime. Can you define junk science? Can you talk about how it intersects with the topic of your book—the criminalization of queer identity, motherhood, and pregnancy?

VB: Junk science is a label that is often applied to forensic evidence. Forensic evidence is evidence from forensic disciplines that came up in police investigations. These were types of evidence that were created by the police for the purpose of being able to identify a suspect as the perpetrator and convict them so they’re biased from the very beginning. 

When we’re thinking about this, we’re thinking about shoeprints, we’re thinking about fingerprints, we’re thinking about bite marks, we’re thinking about fire science investigations. These all grew up in police investigations. That’s where they came from. They did not come from a scientific lab where you have a hypothesis and the hypothesis is tested for whether it is accurate, for whether it is reliable. 

The only forensic evidence that is truly scientific evidence is DNA, and that did grow up in a lab, with hypothesis testing for its reliability and accuracy. DNA evidence has been able to prove these forensic disciplines are faulty. 

Forensic evidence wasn’t about finding out if the evidence was reliable on its own. It was instead about creating evidence to convict defendants. We’re seeing this being used today in real time in these charges based on pregnancy, based on parenting, and based on queer identity. 

We see prosecutors who are trying to bring charges of murder against people who have a stillbirth, and what they use is the floating lung test. This is a test literally from when we would accuse women of being witches and throw them in the river, and if they drowned, they were innocent, but if they floated, they were guilty, and then they would be murdered by the state. This is how old this test is and it is incredibly unreliable.

You take a piece of lung from the fetus and you put it in water to see if it floats. The idea is that if the piece of lung floats, then the baby was born and took its first breath. This test is not only notoriously unreliable, it also gives false positives. 

The last example I’ll give is drug tests and drug testing people who are giving birth in a hospital. These drug tests are not necessarily reliable, and they also don’t indicate [that] there’s any harm to a child. A lot of these fetal harm charges are brought when there’s a positive drug test even when there is a healthy baby.

Giving birth to a healthy child is not necessarily going to be enough to protect someone who is pregnant from allegations that they’ve caused some fetal harm. But having a child who does have health conditions at birth, immediately healthcare providers, with social workers, with police, turn on the pregnant person and say, “What did you do to cause this? What behaviors did you do or not do?” And this is so expansive. This can be: “Were you walking enough? Did you get enough bed rest? What were you eating? Did you eat soft cheeses? Did you eat certain kinds of fish?”

The Appeal: You write about how the majority of known wrongful convictions of women involve cases where no crime occurred. Is there any understanding of why that is? 

VB: According to the National Registry of Exonerations, up to 75 percent of women who were wrongly convicted in the United States were wrongly convicted where no crime occurred. 

So what does that mean? That means there was no criminal act. [For example] there was a space heater that started a fire and yet police thought that the woman was at the home and intentionally set the fire. Police and prosecutors rely on faulty forensic evidence, fire science evidence, and they combine that with gender stereotypes. This is a bad mother, a bad wife, a bad woman who intentionally set the fire. The woman is wrongly convicted based on that confluence of falsehood forensic evidence and gender bias. 

The Appeal: What inspired you to write this book? 

VB: I am a queer woman. I’m married to another woman, and we have a child. We’re a queer family. We were moving back to my home state of Indiana when we were pregnant. Indiana had made abortion illegal in all but the most extreme circumstances, and we knew that there might be pregnancy difficulties, and if there were, we would not have access to abortion. If there were pregnancy difficulties, we could be blamed for that. 

Being queer parents, we are, just by our identities, looked at as more likely to be dangerous towards children. We have never taken bathtub photos of our child because we know that there’s a different lens that can be applied to us as queer people, and it’s a criminalizing lens. That’s what really motivated me to connect the dots to create this term, pink crime, to say, “Hey, this is all going back to gender bias and people in power using the criminal legal system as a lever to punish women and queer people who don’t conform to gender norms.” 

In my home state of Indiana, our governor proclaimed June to be officially “Nuclear Family Month,” which is a man and a woman married with biological children. Our lieutenant governor even posted, “Take back the rainbow.” 

[In their minds] there’s only one model for how people can be a family, and otherwise, you are deviant. This all plays a role in not only why I wrote the book, but why I continue to talk about it and continue to care about it.