Awards

Titled Professor - 2023

Robert McKinney Professor of Law

About Valena Beety

Valena Elizabeth Beety is a law professor, an innocence litigator, and a former federal prosecutor. Before joining Indiana University, Beety served as the Founding Director of the West Virginia Innocence Project at West Virginia University College of Law, and the Deputy Director of the Academy for Justice at Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College 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.

Beety’s 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" (Carolina Academic Press, 2nd ed., 2023) (with Russell Covey), and author of the award-winning book "Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights" (Kensington Books, 2022). She is also a co-author of the treatise "Scientific Evidence" (LexisNexis 6th Ed. 2022) (with Paul C. Giannelli, Edward J. Imwinkelried, Jane Campbell Moriarty & Jennifer Oliva) and the litigation guide "Miscarriages of Justice: Litigating Beyond Factual Innocence" (Academy for Justice, 2023) (with Karen Newirth & Karen Thompson). Her scholarship has been published by the Northwestern University Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, Florida Law Review, and online companions to the University of Chicago Law Review, New York University Law Review, and Emory Law Journal.

Beety clerked for the Honorable Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and for the Honorable Chief Judge James G. Carr of the Northern District of Ohio.