Pages at the Prop - Valena Beth Beety, author of Manifesting Justice
Join us on August 25 as native-Indiana author Valena Beth Beety, discusses her book, Manifesting Justice: Wrongfully Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights. Appetizers and a cash bar will be available from 5:30-6, followed by the program and book-signing. Books will be available for sale.
Register for the event here.
About Manifesting Justice
When Valena Beth Beety first became a federal prosecutor, her goal was to protect victims, especially women, from cycles of violence. What she discovered was that not only did prosecutions often fail to help victims, they frequently relied on false information, forensic fraud, and police and prosecutor misconduct.
Seeking change, Beety began working in the Innocence Movement, helping to free factually innocent people through DNA testing and criminal justice reform. 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 queer individuals—are convicted due to racism, prejudice, coerced confessions, and false identifications.
About the Author
Valena Beth Beety is a law professor, an innocence litigator, and a former federal prosecutor. She has exonerated wrongly convicted clients, founded the West Virginia Innocence Project, and obtained presidential grants of clemency for non-violent drug offenses. She co-edited a guide to causes of wrongful convictions called The Wrongful Convictions Reader. Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights is her first book. Although Beety now lives in Arizona, she grew up in Indianapolis and went to high school at Brebeuf.
