Valena Elizabeth Beety is a law professor, an innocence litigator, and a former federal prosecutor. Beety served as the Founding Director of the West Virginia Innocence Project, at West Virginia University College of Law, the Deputy Director of the Academy for Justice, at Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, and currently as Founding Board Member of the Indiana Innocence Project and Robert McKinney Professor of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law. She has successfully exonerated wrongfully convicted clients, obtained presidential grants of clemency for drug offenses, served as an elected board member of the national Innocence Network, and served as an Appointed Commissioner on the West Virginia Governor’s Indigent Defense Commission. Her experiences as a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., and as an innocence litigator in Mississippi and West Virginia, shape her research and writing on wrongful convictions, forensic evidence, prosecution, and incarceration. She is the co-editor of The Wrongful Convictions Reader, and author of the award-winning book Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights. Her forthcoming book, Just Gender: The Law’s Ramped Up War on Women, Pregnant People, and Queer Identity (The New Press, forthcoming 2025), uses the examples of innocent women who have spent decades in prison for "no crime convictions" and the strategic use of criminal law to limit the bodily autonomy of and criminalize pregnant women, new mothers, and queer people to argue that the criminal treatment of the most vulnerable endangers the rights of everyone