Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity

When your identity is the crime, innocence is no defense“Beety . . . fills important gaps in our conversation around the criminal justice system and innocence.” -Jen Marlowe, author of I Am Troy DavisA 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 Jus