Valena Beety's favorite books to learn about wrongful convictions of women and queer people

I read Queer (In)justice when it first came out in 2012, and it’s still one of the best, and only, books on how the criminal legal system has historically targeted queer people.

I was a staff attorney at the Mississippi Innocence Project at the time, and I was so taken with the book that I immediately reached out to the lead author about our case with Leigh Stubbs and Tami Vance, two women who were wrongly convicted based on their sexual orientation. On June 27, 2012, Leigh and Tami were exonerated after ten years wrongfully in prison.

Queer (In)Justice will, for me, always be connected with their exonerations. The book provided a framework for understanding how queer people have been falsely labeled as dangerous, deviant, and deceptive, and how the criminal legal system has punished us for our identities. 

I was volunteering with the Appalachian Prison Book Project when Hugh Ryan’s book came out.

Suddenly, The Women’s House of Detention was everywhere—RuPaul’s Drag Race, Fresh Air, mainstream news—yet Hugh was willing to do a virtual book talk with volunteers in West Virginia who provide books to incarcerated people. The book tells the history of a prison 500 feet from the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, and the women and transgender individuals who were incarcerated there because of their gender performance and sexual orientation.

Hugh Ryan lays out how women were arrested for going out at night alone, wearing pants, accepting a date from a man, drunkenness, etc., if they were perceived as the “wrong kind of woman.” The prison stood in Greenwich Village from 1929 to 1974, and the experience of women incarcerated there drives home the point that incarceration and punishment of women is not about crime; it is about social control. 

Every year, the Innocence Network hosts a national conference, gathering nearly 1000 people to learn about and fight against wrongful convictions.

I met Jessica Henry at the conference when she was writing Smoke But No Fire, and it is the first book to give a name to no-crime wrongful convictions. While women are only a part of the book, Jessica informs readers of the phenomenon where people are arrested, convicted, and punished, even though literally no crime occurred. Jessica shares how suicides are mislabeled and punished as homicides, and corrupt police plant drugs on innocent suspects.

The book lays the groundwork to understand that people are punished in our criminal legal system who have not committed any criminal acts. As we’ve learned in the time since her book, 75% of exonerated women were wrongly convicted when no crime occurred, which makes her book crucial reading for understanding the wrongful convictions of women.

Audrey Edmunds, a Wisconsin mother providing home daycare, was convicted of killing an infant in her care after the child died and doctors said the child had been shaken to death—Shaken Baby Syndrome.

Edmunds spent over a decade in prison before being exonerated and proving that the evidence used to convict her was flawed and faulty. Some of my own clients, including Tasha Shelby in Mississippi, were wrongly convicted based on Shaken Baby Syndrome when their child tragically died.

If losing your child isn’t tragedy enough, imagine being blamed and punished for it. Audrey’s memoir traces her wrongful conviction, imprisonment, and her reunion with her children, and is a clear example of an accidental tragedy recast as a homicide through faulty forensic science.

Kent Roach, co-founder of the Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions, has spent his career as a lawyer and law professor fighting against wrongful convictions in Canada.

Most known for his best-seller Wrongfully Convicted, Kent recently published Justice for Some, an open-access book comparing wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice internationally, from the U.S. and Canada to China and India. This robust guide (over 650 pages) is one of the first books to explicitly examine the role of gender and stereotypes in wrongful convictions internationally, and to bring attention to the wrongful convictions of Indigenous women.

Kent and I met and bonded over how a legal remedy called “miscarriage of justice” can free innocent women in no-crime cases by asking whether the state can uphold the integrity of the conviction. A miscarriage of justice standard can bring relief where there is false testimony by police, hidden exculpatory evidence by prosecutors, or bogus forensic evidence by state witnesses, by asking about the validity of the conviction instead of the innocence of the defendant.

My first book lays out a path for bringing miscarriage of justice claims, and Kent carries the thread forward in Justice for Some.