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 in Your Inbox

Subscribe to our newsletters for regular updates, analysis and context straight to your email.

Sign Up

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 …