News and announcements

The rise and fall of Winnebago County District Attorney Joe Paulus reveals the immense power of prosecutors – and how it can be abused. A4J Deputy Director Valena Beety was a guest on episode two of the new podcast Open and Shut.

With her confirmation by the Senate, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will be the first United States Supreme Court justice who previously served as a public defender and, for the first time since the court’s founding in 1790, the first Black woman to sit on the highest court.

A new book by Chris Fabricant, director of the Innocence Project, sheds light on what he calls the broken, racist justice system in our country. It’s called, “Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System.”

“Carceral feminist” is the phrase Valena Beety used to describe her old self, when she was a law student and prosecutor. The author of the forthcoming criminal justice book Manifesting Justice believed in the power of locking people up to “stop cycles of violence,” as many perpetrators of violent offenses are repeat offenders. She believed in her victim advocate work.

Valena Beety is a professor at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and the deputy director of the college’s Academy for Justice. She is looking more deeply at how we can transform our criminal legal system and reexamine what we see as wrongful convictions. She notes that more people are wrongfully convicted and in prison than those we can prove are factually innocent because the standard is incredibly high to prove innocence.

To talk more about Griner’s case and some of the issues surrounding it, The Show spoke with Valena Beety, a professor of law and deputy director of the Academy for Justice at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law

Valena Beety, a law professor and deputy director of the Academy for Justice at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, tells Texas Standard that while the Russian government says Griner was arrested for having vape pods containing hashish oil, the country also has a history of planting criminal evidence on activists or high-profile people it wants to detain for political purposes.

“In Russia, once you’re charged, there’s a 99% likelihood of being convicted, so we’re really into this situation where I hope diplomatic measures will work in finding the truth and bringing Brittney Griner home,” said Valena Beety, a law professor at Arizona State University that has written books about wrongfully convicted women. Beety believes Griner’s identity and race placed a role in the drug charges against her.