Valena Beety - "Pink Crime" - Nathan Maxwell
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Valena Beety will discuss "Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity." She will be joined in conversation by Nathan Maxwell. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
At the Co-op.
About the book: A woman miscarries--and is charged with murder. A new mother tests positive for a drug her hospital administered--and loses custody of her newborn. Four women are convicted of horrific crimes against children they never touched, based on junk science and homophobia--and spend nearly twenty years in prison before being exonerated. A queer teenager takes a photo of a child's diaper rash at work--and is sentenced to 126 years. These cases are not aberrations. They are symptoms of a system that punishes women and queer people not for what they have done, but for who they are.
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.
Drawing on devastating real-life cases, Beety exposes how prosecutorial overreach, flawed forensic science, and cultural panic converge--and how fetal personhood laws, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation have dramatically expanded the reach of criminal law. What emerges is a chilling portrait of a legal system that increasingly criminalizes pregnancy outcomes, motherhood, and queer identity itself.
About the author: Valena Elizabeth Beety is a law professor, innocence litigator, and former federal prosecutor who has exonerated the wrongfully convicted, secured presidential grants of clemency, and produced scholarship cited by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Her work centers the women and queer people most targeted by the U.S. criminal legal system. Beety is the Robert McKinney Professor of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and a Founding Board Member of the Indiana Innocence Project. Her book "Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights" received a Gold Medal in Women’s Issues from the Independent Publishers Book Award, and her coursebook "The Wrongful Convictions Reader" is used in classrooms across the United States to teach about wrongful convictions.
About the Interlocutor: Nathan Maxwell is a Senior Attorney at Lambda Legal’s Midwest Regional Office, based in Chicago, IL. Nathan litigates cases on behalf of LGBTQ+ people and all people living with HIV/AIDS. His practice primarily includes constitutional law, employment discrimination, healthcare, and prisoners’ rights.
Before joining Lambda Legal, Nathan was an Assistant Federal Public Defender for the Federal Public Defender in the District of Arizona in the Capital Habeas Unit. Nathan clerked for Judge Terrence Berg in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, and for Judge Amy Totenberg in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. Before clerking, he was the Justice Franklin D. Cleckley Fellow for the West Virginia Innocence Project under Professor Valena Beety.
Nathan Maxwell is a 2016 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School.
Nathan is admitted to the State Bars of Arizona and Illinois.
At the Co-op.
About the book: A woman miscarries--and is charged with murder. A new mother tests positive for a drug her hospital administered--and loses custody of her newborn. Four women are convicted of horrific crimes against children they never touched, based on junk science and homophobia--and spend nearly twenty years in prison before being exonerated. A queer teenager takes a photo of a child's diaper rash at work--and is sentenced to 126 years. These cases are not aberrations. They are symptoms of a system that punishes women and queer people not for what they have done, but for who they are.
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.
Drawing on devastating real-life cases, Beety exposes how prosecutorial overreach, flawed forensic science, and cultural panic converge--and how fetal personhood laws, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation have dramatically expanded the reach of criminal law. What emerges is a chilling portrait of a legal system that increasingly criminalizes pregnancy outcomes, motherhood, and queer identity itself.
About the author: Valena Elizabeth Beety is a law professor, innocence litigator, and former federal prosecutor who has exonerated the wrongfully convicted, secured presidential grants of clemency, and produced scholarship cited by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Her work centers the women and queer people most targeted by the U.S. criminal legal system. Beety is the Robert McKinney Professor of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and a Founding Board Member of the Indiana Innocence Project. Her book "Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights" received a Gold Medal in Women’s Issues from the Independent Publishers Book Award, and her coursebook "The Wrongful Convictions Reader" is used in classrooms across the United States to teach about wrongful convictions.
About the Interlocutor: Nathan Maxwell is a Senior Attorney at Lambda Legal’s Midwest Regional Office, based in Chicago, IL. Nathan litigates cases on behalf of LGBTQ+ people and all people living with HIV/AIDS. His practice primarily includes constitutional law, employment discrimination, healthcare, and prisoners’ rights.
Before joining Lambda Legal, Nathan was an Assistant Federal Public Defender for the Federal Public Defender in the District of Arizona in the Capital Habeas Unit. Nathan clerked for Judge Terrence Berg in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, and for Judge Amy Totenberg in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. Before clerking, he was the Justice Franklin D. Cleckley Fellow for the West Virginia Innocence Project under Professor Valena Beety.
Nathan Maxwell is a 2016 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School.
Nathan is admitted to the State Bars of Arizona and Illinois.
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Where is it happening?
5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637
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