Valena Elizabeth Beety is a law professor, an innocence litigator, and a former federal prosecutor. Valena served as the founding director of the West Virginia Innocence Project and is currently a board member of the Indiana Innocence Project and a law professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law. She is the co-editor of The Wrongful Convictions Reader, and author of the book Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights. Her new book is Pink Crime: Fighting the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity (The New Press, forthcoming 2026). She is a queer Hoosier fighting in the Heartland.