Valena Beety

Valena Elizabeth Beety is a professor of law and director of the West Virginia Innocence Project at the West Virginia University College of Law. A 2006 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, Beety clerked for Chief Judge James G. Carr of the Northern District of Ohio, and the Honorable Martha Craig Daughtrey of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. She served as a prosecutor in the US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia before joining the Mississippi Innocence Project as a senior staff attorney. While teaching as an adjunct professor at the University of Mississippi School of Law, Beety received the 2012 BLSA Faculty Member of the Year Award. At WVU, Beety created and was the inaugural director of the LL.M. in forensic justice, launched in fall 2015. Beety serves nationally as a board member of the Innocence Network, and in West Virginia on the governor's Indigent Defense Commission.

Current Work:

Beety's recent work on forensics include "Changing the Culture of Disclosure and Forensics," (73 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. Online 580 [2017]), urging greater prosecutorial disclosure and defense comprehension of forensic evidence, and Discovering Forensic Fraud, (112 NW. U. L. REV. 124 [2017]), criticizing the disparate rules of discovery and disclosure that pertain to forensic expert evidence in civil versus criminal cases and arguing that the adoption of the pretrial civil discovery rules in criminal proceedings would mitigate and, possibly, eliminate the admission of faulty forensic expert evidence in criminal trials. "Discovering Forensic Fraud" is the first in a trilogy of short essays comparing the admission and disclosure of forensic evidence in criminal and civil cases. Finally, Beety is working on an empirical piece examining the disparity in effective death investigations between medical examiners and elected coroners.

Research Area Keyword(s):

Forensic evidence, wrongful convictions, criminal justice