Transcript
Speaker: A federal prosecutor walks into a courtroom to protect women and walks out fighting to free the ones the system got wrong. We're going to get into it. Let's get it.
Speaker: Welcome. First of all, welcome. This is Unsolicited Perspectives. i am your host, Bruce Anthony, here to lead the conversation in important events and topics that are shaping today's society. Join the conversation to follow us wherever you get your audio podcasts. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for our video podcasts, YouTube exclusive content, and our YouTube membership.
Speaker: Rate, review, like, comment, share. Share with your friends, share with your family, hell, even share with your enemies. On today's episode, I'm sitting down with Valina Beattie, a law professor and former federal prosecutor who now fights wrongful convictions.
Speaker: We're going to be talking about junk science, women convicted of crimes that never happened, and who really gets the benefit of a doubt. But that's enough of the intro. Let's get to the show.
Speaker: I want to start in a hospital room today. Think about the worst day a family can have in one of those rooms. A pregnancy that doesn't make it, a baby who won't wake up, a parent running their child through their emergency room doors, hands shaking so badly that they can't even fill out forms.
Speaker: Now imagine that in the middle of all that grief, the questions change. They stop sounding like somebody who cares about you and start sounding like somebody is building a case.
Speaker: And before you even understand what's happening, your loss is turned into an investigation. And the prime suspect is you. This is not a movie.
Speaker: This is happening to mothers, to women, to queer folks, and more often than not, to people who are already poor, already black or brown, and already used to not being believed.
Speaker: Now y'all know me. I'm a black man. I'm a minority in this country. I grew up with a natural side eye toward the system because I learned early on that doesn't always work the same for people who look like me.
Speaker: But most Americans don't walk around thinking that. Most folks figure that if it made it to the courtroom, the evidence got checked and the system did its job. Except sometimes nobody checked.
Speaker: And I'm going to bring up something that's important.
Speaker: Protecting kids is absolutely, extremely important. Y'all know Bruce loved the kids. When a child gets hurt, somebody should be asking these hard and tough questions.
Speaker: What we're going to be examining today is the problem of these people that are asking the hard questions, but they've already decided on what the answer is.
Speaker: My guest today is Valena Beattie. Valena was a federal prosecutor. She took that job to protect women from violence. Then she saw something from the inside that made her cross over and spend her career fighting wrongful convictions.
Speaker: She founded the West Virginia Innocence Project, and her work on forensic evidence has even been cited by Supreme Court justices. She sat on both sides of the courtroom. And y'all know how I feel.
Speaker: i don't want to be right. I want to be correct. It takes a certain kind of person to look back at the side that they used to be at on and say, hmm, we got some things wrong.
Speaker: So I'm really looking forward to this conversation. So without further ado, Valena Beattie. As I say at the top, I'm here with Valena Beattie, the author of Pink Crime, Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity. Valena, thank you so much for coming on the show. I talk so much about important subjects that...
Speaker: people miss because the algorithm gives them puppies and things that make you happy. But there are also serious matters that are affecting everyday people in society that some people are just not aware of. And we're going talking about it today. So I'm so thankful to have you on the show. ah Thanks for having me.
Speaker: Absolutely. I start every interview with one question. Let's go back. I want to go back to the beginning. Tell me what it was like growing up in Indianapolis. Tell me about your family.
Speaker: Tell me about your upbringing and how it shaped you to become the person that you are today. um I'll try to keep it short. You can keep it as long as you want. This this episode is about you and your work.
Speaker: yeah So, yeah, I grew up just outside Indy. Both of my parents are Hoosiers, so I'm a Hoosier. And my dad and my granddad worked for General Motors.
Speaker: And then my mom was a public school teacher in Indianapolis Public School System. Right. So they both taught me that it really matters working hard and being known as a hard worker. ah But they also taught me that life isn't fair and the world isn't fair and you can work hard and still not be treated fairly.
Speaker: ah So my mom in particular always taught me to be able to look out for myself, to be able to support myself and to always look out for others, to to be aware of that. You know, that, again, there are other people who are fighting just as hard as I am and working just as hard as I am and aren't going to get the same breaks ah and aren't going to be treated fairly, just like could happen to me. So that, you know, that's that was kind of the mindset growing up.
Speaker: So your parents imprint this on you. they they They give you the wisdom to say, hey, look, you got to work hard, but life isn't always fair. And sometimes life isn't fair to other people. can where there Can you give me an example of growing up where you saw the words that your parents said to you, but then you saw it in real life outside of your parents? Like it was you that were like, oh, this is what my parents were talking about.
Speaker: a I think, it you know, a lot of there were my mom taught child development. She is a home economics teacher. And so that was one of the classes that she taught, which I think is great. You know, that she was teaching high schoolers how to take care of kids. So she had a number of pregnant girls and young moms in her classes, and she would take a number of them kind of under her wing and look out for them and how they could support each other. Right. Because if you're you know, kind of feeling on your own and you're a new mom, there's nothing more important than being able to have other people who. can connect with you, that you can, even if it's the other new moms that you're in the class with, that you can connect on how can we look after our kids together? How can we keep going to school? How can we make sure to, you know, graduate?
Speaker: And really just That really impressed on me. You know, I did not have a kid when I was in high school. And that it could just change your path so much and not having people there to support you and then having to choose between going to school and looking after your own, you know, a small family now. I didn't have to face that. And I saw...
Speaker: My mom trying to both support those those young women and to help them figure out how to support themselves. ah So I'd say that was one way that it really showed through for me.
Speaker: So you grow up and you are looking at how society is different for some people and how some people have to make these tough decisions. And then you go to school and you become a prosecutor, but you become a prosecutor for a very specific reason is to protect women from violence.
Speaker: One, how did you get to that? And then two, what did you see from the inside that eventually made you switch sides? Yeah. he so in high school, too, I also saw sexual violence, domestic violence. And when I was in college, I became a rape victim advocate across the city of Chicago. So I was on call for different hospitals in Chicago to go and be there as an advocate for a survivor who comes into the emergency room.
Speaker: And through that experience, I decided i wanted to go to law school and I wanted to be a prosecutor and I wanted to prosecute these really tough sex offenses because there's a number of sex offenders who...
Speaker: repeatedly harm people. And so my thought was, okay, if that person is locked up, then they're not going to harm others. That's going to stop cycles of violence. So I think in the language we'd use today, I was a ah carceral feminist. I really thought that prison would would solve would solve some of those problems.
Speaker: So I went to law school. I got my dream job. I became a prosecutor. And I realized through doing the job ah that we weren't necessarily, at least in my office, we weren't looking out for survivors. If a survivor didn't want to be involved in the case or didn't want to testify, we had a practice of arresting that person and detaining them in jail before the hearing or before trial to make sure that they would show up.
Speaker: Right? Okay. I know. I know. It's wild. It's wild. I just want to make sure, for me and the audience, that I heard you clearly. The victim of the crime. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: and And we know with assault, sexual assaults, that ah one, a lot of times that they're not reported. And two, even if they are reported, it becomes traumatic for the for the victim to relive that experience. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: So you're saying that in your office, because you can't speak for all offices, but for your office, you would actually arrest the victim if they didn't want to take the stand? Mm-hmm. Wow. So day before, you knew that you would be able to bring them in.
Speaker: for the hearing. Wow. Yeah. And those are the things that just get normalized. You know, it's like, oh, this is just what we do. So that that would happen.
Speaker: So clearly when when survivors didn't want to be involved in the case or wanted it dropped, it didn't matter. Right. It was our decision as the government, as prosecutors to to decide on that.
Speaker: And then and we also didn't consider what the survivor would want as like what would make them whole. We just try to get criminal charges. But at the same time, know, I saw us having really serious cases, really seriously violent cases. And again, the office would encourage us to drop those down to a misdemeanor offense, which means the maximum time you can get is a year, because the idea was misdemeanor cases, you don't have to go before a jury.
Speaker: And a jury is going to think this is just a he said, she said. They're not going to you know rule against the defendant. So take it down to a misdemeanor, and then you can get the win.
Speaker: But what does the win matter if the win is three months in prison? We know that prison is criminogenic, meaning people are more likely to commit crimes once they've been to prison. So what is that doing? Again, my my beginning goal was to stop these cycles of violence. And this was doing very little to actually meet that goal and also was, i thought, harming survivors in the process.
Speaker: So, yeah I didn't know that until I started doing the job. And i also didn't know, and this is, again, not all police, but I didn't know... you know, personally, ah that yeah, police will just lie.
Speaker: So kind of figuring that out and like how to, I mean, i know, I'm very naive on that. No, no, no, no, no. I'm not, I'm not, that face wasn't because i think you're naive. um Because I think the majority of people believe in the system, even especially when you're working in the system. yeah ah My thing is you are outright saying that they will lie.
Speaker: yeah Lie like in how? And when you downgrade... I have so many questions now, and I know that I'm detouring from from the what the structure of the ah this interview was going to be, but I have two questions that I just have to get answered. One, like, how severe of a felony would be downgraded to a misdemeanor? And the cops would lie like how?
Speaker: and and And is this all just to... get clearances so that their stats look good. You know, I'm out here in D.C. I watch The Wire, so I know something about cooking the books and stats only from The Wire. But is is that really what it's that what they're doing in those cases?
Speaker: ah So i'm goingnna I'm going to watch myself. Okay. ah So I did both. I did domestic violence, I did sexual violence, and I did drug offenses and armed with a weapon while...
Speaker: drug distribution, et cetera. So it was more in the kind of drug offense, armed weapon ah cases where, yeah, I mean, police would ah collaborate to make sure that their individual stories matched.
Speaker: I actually had a supervisor when I was like, hey, look, they all got different stories about what happened and where were the drugs and where'd they find them and what happened with the defendant and why did the defendant have these injuries? You know, they all have different stories about it. And I had a supervisor who said, oh, why are you talking to them separately?
Speaker: You should have all of them in the room together when you talk with them, which is I've said that to other prosecutors and they've been shocked. OK, so I like to think that there's definitely other offices where, you know, they would you'll be appalled by that. ah But that's just kind of a sign of of.
Speaker: The culture of the office I was working in. Yeah. okay I'm hearing you as you're describing the culture of the office that you're working in. And I have a couple couple of questions.
Speaker: One, how long did you work in the office? And two, how long was it working in that office that you decided, you know what, I'm going to go ahead and switch sides.
Speaker: Yeah, so there, you know, a little over a year, so not that long. And a friend of mine worked at the New Orleans Innocence Project. So he investigated if people were wrongly convicted in Louisiana and New Orleans. And was unhappy about my job. I was not happy. And he told me about this opening at the Mississippi Innocence Project to hire a staff attorney.
Speaker: And, you know, I'm from the Midwest. I had never lived in the Deep South. And i was like, am I really going to am i really goingnna make that move? But I went down. I went down for an interview. And they wanted me to stay for a couple days to really get a feel for it. So I did. Got to meet folks.
Speaker: And then they the project,
Speaker: and I think we're going to talk about LaVon Brooks and Kenny Brewer a little bit and their wrongful convictions. due to bite marks or to bogus bite marks. But LaVon Brooks had just gotten out of prison within the past year, and he had served many years for a crime he did not commit, I think nearly 20 years.
Speaker: And here he is, and he's out, again, less than a year, and his mom dies. oh And his mom had advocated for him for all those years.
Speaker: So they were having a funeral and the Mississippi Innocence Project folks were going. And I mean, of course they were. And so they asked if I wanted to go too. And I said, yes. Even though I was like, this is, you know, I'm prosecuting people right now. And here's this man who was wrongly prosecuted, wrongly convicted. ah Should I even be there? mean But I went and we drove down.
Speaker: And folks were really... When, you know, we were eating and the people were really welcoming and kind. And I got to talk with LeVon. And i remember saying, you know, you must be so angry, you know, that you finally get out. And now your mom passes after all those years of her fighting for you.
Speaker: And he said she could finally put her hammer down. you know, she had fought for me and she saw me freed. And that really stuck with me. And I was like, this is the work I need to be doing. This is this is what I want to be part of. It just felt so much the opposite of what I was doing as a prosecutor.
Speaker: And so I did it. I i got the offer. i accepted it. And i I moved down to Mississippi and lived there for a couple years. What does it take? I always say I don't want to be right. I want to be correct. i think those are two very, very different things. What does it take that to change your mind? It it seems like it it it took a variety of factors for you to get to the place from going to prosecute, from being a prosecutor to helping the wrongfully convicted. What does it change in your mind when someone's freedom is on a line?
Speaker: Yeah, I love that you asked that because as a former prosecutor, i would take on these wrongful conviction cases and I believed passionately in them because I knew them deeply. I knew the evidence of innocence.
Speaker: It is so much harder, so much harder to reverse a conviction than for a prosecutor to get a conviction in the first place. And I say that speaking from experience. And so I would go to prosecutors and say, will you agree to DNA testing?
Speaker: And every single time, every single time, the prosecutor would say no. Prosecutor would say, it you have to go to court. You have to litigate for this. You have to ask a court to do this every single time.
Speaker: And i I was surprised by that because I thought, okay, if you're a prosecutor, then hopefully you're confident in the conviction and confident enough that you're like, sure, do the DNA testing. That's going to prove that the person is guilty.
Speaker: But if you have questions... then you should want to know that someone is innocent who's in prison. Someone's wrongfully convicted. And with Levon's case, the fact that he and Kenny were both wrongly convicted meant that the true perpetrator continued to be out in the world and continued to be harming people. We know that for a fact.
Speaker: So I was surprised how hard it was to change the minds of prosecutors, that they wouldn't even agree to the DNA testing. And then you have prosecutors, even when you have the DNA evidence, they still say, nope, there's got to be a way that this person is guilty. Or they change the theory of the case. Oh, well, maybe there was an unnamed, unknown second person who they assisted.
Speaker: And, you know, the worst part now is that even when prosecutors do agree, we have judges now who say, nope, we have to have an adversarial system. If the prosecutor and the defense both agree to reverse someone's conviction, then I'm going to appoint someone else to fight against this because there has to be someone fighting against the the reversal.
Speaker: Okay. So... Why would... I'm coming from a ah point, like I said, I'd rather be correct rather than right.
Speaker: So yeah what what is it... And I'm not doing this for all prosecutors, because I'm sure there are some cases where prosecutors were like, hey yeah, I had some doubts about this. le Let's work on this together.
Speaker: yeah But you're saying that the majority of the time that they are fighting against this... Is it just, is it ego? Is it pride? Is it a a reversal of a conviction looks bad on their rep? What is it that forces these prosecutors to say no?
Speaker: And why is it so much harder to reverse a conviction rather than to get a conviction? Yeah. So I think it's all of those things that lead prosecutors to push back on,
Speaker: For example, doing DNA testing that would show proof positive if someone is innocent or guilty. I also think one thing I talk about in my book, Pink Crime, is that fat is tunnel vision. that And I saw this with police, too, that police and prosecutors, you know, they'd focus just in on one theory of the case and one suspect.
Speaker: And so then if they're like, OK, you know what? to murder and Valina Beattie committed it, then any evidence that supported that, they'd they'd bring in, they'd highlight. But any evidence that would say, no, it wasn't Valina. It's not her. They would ignore. They would downplay. They would exclude. In worst case scenarios, they would hide, which prosecutors have done, hiding that exculpatory evidence. it king even though I'll just for folks to know, prosecutors do have an obligation called Brady, which means they have to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense.
Speaker: Do they do that all the time? No. So I think it's that tunnel vision, right? And also, if you have an office that's saying, hey, it's more important to convict someone who's a bad person than if they committed the crime, right? I don't know if this person did this or not, but I know they're going to do something else. I know they're a bad person, so we're going to do what we can. If that's the mentality of the office, that's really harmful. Right.
Speaker: And that means whatever evidence someone else can bring in, it's not going to be listened to. i I don't think this is hard to believe. I think a lot of people out there that are listening and watching this know either personally or know when they get into debates with other people, arguments, whatever you decide to call them, what you're describing as confirmation bias is that they that they are just absolutely, this is what I believe and I'm going to find all the evidence to back up what I believe.
Speaker: We are going to get to your book. i Don't worry. We are going to get to your book. But I want to actually get to some stuff before you book before your book. I want to talk about one of your cases because it shows everything that we've been talking about so far in this conversation. lee Stubbs, Leah Stubbs, called an ambulance for a friend who was overdosing and ended up in prison. How does a call for help become a violent crime?
Speaker: Yeah, it's because of who makes the call. And i I just had someone share with me a story. And she's black woman, married, her husband, black man, they have a daughter. And her daughter, when she was young, ah slipped in the bathtub and injured herself and was bleeding and was bleeding from her vagina.
Speaker: And so husband calls the wife and says, hey, she needs to go to the hospital. You need to come home to take her. And the wife is like, I'm at work. Like, you need to just take her to the hospital. And husband is like, no way am I taking her to the hospital. Because if I take her to the hospital, they're immediately going to think that I assaulted my daughter. Right. They're going to call CPS on me. You have to be the one who comes home and takes her to the hospital. And the wife did. Right. The wife got it and she came home and.
Speaker: So he'll take the daughter to the hospital and get treatment. And the daughter was fine. But that's a prime example. And he was on top of it. He knew what what could happen. And that's what happened with Lee Stubbs. Lee Stubbs is there with her friend.
Speaker: hum Lee Stubbs and Tammy Vance, they're there with their friend and their friend overdoses. So they call an ambulance and the ambulance comes, takes this woman to the hospital.
Speaker: She's in a coma, but they're in rural Mississippi. It's a country doctor and the country doctor says that, you know, he thinks maybe she was sexually assaulted.
Speaker: sort of So ah the country doctor, this should be surprising, decides to call a local dentist who is a forensic odontologist, which means he studies bite marks, decides to call the local dentist to come in and examine this woman, Kim, her body.
Speaker: So the dentist, Dr. West, I know, I know. It's a dentist examining the body. Does the body have barked bite marks on it? Well, if Dr. West is there, yes, of course it does, because he's going to find bite marks, right? Whatever it is, he's going to find bite marks. no I mean, he would find bite marks that he would say, oh this is just the top teeth.
Speaker: I mean, who's going to bite into something with just their top teeth? But, I mean, he he would find things, and there were bug bites. they There were all sorts of other things, but he would say they were bite marks. So, of course, it's like kind of a foregone conclusion that if he's called in there's going to be bite marks. So he comes in, he... all It's all bad. He comes in, he examines this woman while she's in a coma. He examines her when she's naked.
Speaker: So she can't consent, right? He records the examination and he says that, yes, there are bite marks. So who could cause these bite marks except for ah the key factor I forgot to say, Lee and TME were both lesbians. So it had to have been these lesbians who bit this woman and injured this woman. Yeah.
Speaker: So that brings me to my next question. Junk science. Yeah. Yeah. So how does junk science get treated as fact in a courtroom? Can you explain, one, what junk science is and how that junk science is like, oh yeah, this is absolute fact?
Speaker: Yeah, so junk science, you know, we we generally understand science as it's tested in a lab. And it's not about whether the science and the hypothesis is proven right or wrong. Like either way, that's going to be a valuable result. You know, if I think I'm going to be able to change the color of...
Speaker: ah My book from pink to green, if I put something on it and it doesn't change, that's valuable information. But forensic science is science that was developed by the police specifically for policing and for obtaining convictions.
Speaker: So we've got shoe prints. We've got bite marks. We've got ah fire science. We got handwriting. So these are all things that police developed. So they're not testing it in a lab. They're not seeing like, oh, is this actually accurate? Is it reliable?
Speaker: no they're just saying, ok does this create evidence that convicts our defendant? So this is what we're talking about. We're talking about junk science and faulty forensic evidence.
Speaker: How does it come in ah Because it had been kind of grandfathered in for many years ah that courts just said, hey, we've always accepted bite marks. In fact, every state except for one courts continue to accept bite mark evidence. And bite marks are the worst because.
Speaker: Bite mark experts have themselves tried to do studies, have tested themselves to say, okay, okay, so we're the professionals. Can we determine whether something is a bite mark or not? And if it is a bite mark, can we determine if it's an animal bite mark or a human bite mark? And guess what? They can't.
Speaker: They can't, even when they test themselves. So if they can't do that, they definitely can't say a bite mark matches Felina Beattie. Mm-hmm. And yet in every state except for Texas, this evidence can still come in that the court's like, oh, the prosecutor wants to to propose in and admit It'll generally come in. So so that's what we're talking about with with junk science.
Speaker: And and I'll just circle back to ah it's harder to reverse a conviction because at trial, you know, you've you've got your evidence and both sides are arguing and it no are often successful.
Speaker: But in post-conviction, story's done, right? I mean, that you've had an appeal. The courts don't want to go back and look at it. As I said, prosecutors don't want to go back and look at it.
Speaker: And there's already a story. In fact, there's a written criminal appeal that says, here's what happened. Belina Beattie did X, Y, z And so I'm trying to then come in and say, no, I didn't. And here's the evidence. Guess what? Here's my alibi, Bruce. I was with him at that time. I was on his podcast.
Speaker: You know I'm trying to show all this evidence. But the standard is so hard and so high to reverse a conviction that the court can just say, eh, they probably should have considered that.
Speaker: They didn't. Harmless error. It's fine. So it's very, very hard to reverse a conviction. You know, you broke my heart just now. Because when when I was thinking about junk science, I'm thinking of, I don't know, like, astro you know, an astrologist coming in or somebody that that's they' saying I'm a medium or something like that.
Speaker: What you are literally saying is one of my favorite shows, Forensic Files, yeah is full of junk science. And the whole time that I go on these binge-watching episodes of Forensic Files, and I'm like, man, they really got that that they really got that person? That was a good case. That was a good prosecution. No, what you're telling me is it's junk science, that it was solely created, solely created,
Speaker: Yeah. To prosecute. Yeah. And to basically send people to jail. oh Yeah. Okay. And when they do test it, they're like, oh, this doesn't stand up. Like you if you actually try to test the evidence, like, oh, this doesn't actually. I mean, fire science is a great example where there are all these fire myths that this proves it was arson. And they're just false.
Speaker: So, yeah. Sorry. I want to go back to something earlier that you said. When you said, that you know, the that the prosecutors and cops kind of just get that tunnel vision, get that confirmation bias on particular suspects. What happens to that evidence that doesn't fit? You said some prosecutors just kind of bury it. Is it, is it?
Speaker: Is it solely the people? Are they just solely bad actors? Or is it the system built to just reward convictions and that's the reason why they're doing it? So in other words, are they just bad people or is it a bad system or little both?
Speaker: A little bit of both. I think there's a lot of prosecutors who are believing in what they do. ah and would be insulted if um I said, hey you might have wrongfully convicted someone.
Speaker: Or, hey, your office might wrongly convict people. Who'd be insulted by that? I think that's kind of a problem that we build up prosecutors as, you know, the the white knight who never does wrong. Because then prosecutors have to live up to that. And then they're like, nope, I can't make any errors. I can't make any mistakes. I mean, I know I, you know, ragged out some police earlier. but Actually, if you look at wrongful convictions, police are more likely to admit like, oh, yeah, we messed that up. We shouldn't have done that. They're more likely to say that and concede that and be like, yeah, you know what? That person shouldn't be in there than prosecutors. Because, again, prosecutors, it's like you're not allowed to be wrong. yeah So, ah yeah, I i think it's it's both. It's the tunnel vision. It's the...
Speaker: expectations that even though you're human, you can't make any mistakes. Yeah. yeah And the fear of admitting any of that. Yeah. it It's tough for people to admit when they're wrong.
Speaker: Your a new book, Pink Crime, it's about convictions. Even when there's no crime that occurred. We talked about it earlier about a case that you did before writing this book.
Speaker: and the dentists and the bite marks and all this other stuff. How does an ordinary tragedy become a criminal case? and In other words, how does... A situation like the the the the black man ah not wanting his take. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Where there was no... Right. Yeah. Right. i i I was once married and my ex-wife worked. It was a little teeny tiny woman. And she worked with children with autism. She worked with high school age and children with autism and very severely on the spectrum. And she had she would have to physically restrain them. Now, she would come home with bruises.
Speaker: I'm six foot four, 250 pound Black man, right? Ball head, tattoos, the whole nine. And we lived in an area that's right outside the Pentagon, right outside of Washington, D.C., kind of an affluent area.
Speaker: And I told her, i said, you have to make sure that you document every time that you have a bruise or altercation at your job. She was like, why? It's like, you can't be in a relationship with me, living with me, coming home with bruises. She was like, but like, I would, of course, never report or anything. She's like, and I said, no, our neighbors, if you come home with a black eye or a bruise on your head,
Speaker: They're going to thank me. So how does something that's just a normal occurrence, that's not a crime, end up in a criminal case? Yeah. And thank you, Bruce, for sharing that, because you're right on point.
Speaker: That's exactly know one example of what happens when, again, there's there's no criminal act. And yet police investigate, Child Protective Services get involved, and then prosecutors bring charges. So an example I have in my book is this woman I work with in Indiana who's the director of our Indiana Innocence Project, Christine Bunch.
Speaker: And fellow Hoosier, and she was a young mom, a single mom, you know, had her own high school diploma and was working to get, ah you know, welding diploma to be able to to do more work and provide for her son.
Speaker: And in the middle of the night, there's an electrical fire in her home. And I think we can all imagine this, you know, we've got space heaters, you leave the space heater on at night and then it catches on fire. yeah So there's a fire in her home and she can't get to her son.
Speaker: And she tries to get through this wall of flames to get to her son and she can't. And she's got burns on her. So she goes outside and she takes a ah tricycle and she busts it through the window of her young son and tries to get in that way.
Speaker: And her neighbors are holding her back. And at that point, the fire... station, the firefighters come. And so they rush into the home and an ambulance is there and it takes Christine to the hospital for her own injuries.
Speaker: So Christine goes to the hospital believing that the firefighters have saved her from her son, that she's going to be treated and he's going to be there soon.
Speaker: And instead, police arrive to interrogate her at the hospital, at her bedside. And that's when she finds out that her son has died and that police think she set the fire to murder her son.
Speaker: So and that's a prime example of no-crime situation.
Speaker: charge And then she goes to trial and she's wrongly convicted based on this bogus junk science of fire science evidence. Also police lying. so they straight out lied about, oh, we found accelerant in the little boy's room, fire accelerant, which was not there.
Speaker: And then gender bias. She didn't want to be a mom. And, you know, they couldn't even come up with a motive. ah But they just kept saying she didn't want to be a mom. She didn't want to do this. She she actually she did not ever.
Speaker: There's a lot of moms in these situations who will say, oh, my gosh, i I should have been able to save my son. I'm such a bad mom. I'm such a bad person. And that's used as a confession.
Speaker: But Christine never did that. And so then the prosecution instead said, you know what? We don't hear a word of regret from her. She doesn't say, I wish it had been me. She doesn't say she regrets anything from that night.
Speaker: That's all you need to know. This was an intentionally set fire and she killed her son. And she was wrongly convicted. So damn if you do, damn if you don't. Yeah, exactly. You have another...
Speaker: situation in your book. Can you walk us through one of the pregnancy loss and how does a miscarriage become a crime? Yeah. So my book, Pink Crime, really talks about, so all these no crime wrongful convictions you and I have been talking about today, ah now that abortion can be illegal in a lot of states, it's just really ramped up.
Speaker: So we're seeing a lot of these no crime charges, no crime, wrongful convictions related to pregnancy, related to you know a miscarriage that becomes murder or becomes abuse of fetal remains or fetal harm or stillbirths that are then charged as homicide.
Speaker: And these, again, are based on junk science. Yeah. How can a still, how how, how is junk science saying that these are murders? Yeah.
Speaker: Which one do you want to hear about first? do you want to hear about miscarriage or stillbirth? Both. But less and let's know let's start with the miscarriage. I know. i it's these are These are heavy topics. but yeah So, miscarriage. Let's talk about Patience Frazier, who's a woman in rural Nevada. She already has two kids. She's got a broken down car. She gets pregnant.
Speaker: She's living with someone. She can't even make it to get prenatal care. She's not sure she wants to have this third kid. ah And in the midst of that, she has a miscarriage. Right.
Speaker: And she names she names the fetus, names a Abel, and then she buries him in her backyard. And she posts on social media her burial.
Speaker: And she says, I'm so sorry, Abel. I'm such a bad mom. Exactly we were just talking about. So she says this. And then a SWAT team of police come into her home to investigate.
Speaker: They dig up the remains. And they start interrogating her. And initially, Patience is like, what are you doing here? This is intensely private. like Why are you involved in this at all?
Speaker: But through the interrogation, she starts to believe that she caused the miscarriage. Now, almost one in four pregnancies end in a miscarriage, and they're spontaneous. And there's nothing—it doesn't matter how much you want to have the baby or don't want to. There's nothing you can do to to cause or prevent that miscarriage in terms of spontaneous miscarriages. ah But these police kept telling her, you caused it, you caused it. This is also a narrative we hear in society. You must have caused it. you There must have been something you did. Did you eat fish? Did you walk too much?
Speaker: You were supposed to be on bed rest, whatever. So patience confesses, ah kid you not, confesses to lifting heavy weights and to eating too much cinnamon.
Speaker: and then those must have right And that those must have caused the miscarriage. And so she now believes she caused this. She pleads guilty. She goes to prison.
Speaker: And it's not until post-conviction, there's an attorney representing her, that she finally hears from some experts that she didn't cause the miscarriage. It wasn't her. They were just lying to her. Because police can lie to you. i think folks hopefully know that police can legally lie to everyone. In some states, they can't lie to juveniles, but otherwise, they can lie to you.
Speaker: So that's that's just one example it It seems like, and and I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like that's also a failure of her defense attorney.
Speaker: Oh, yes, for sure. I agree. Yes. How often are these cases, you know, we talked about the prosecutors, we've been burying the prosecutors, but how often are these cases just poor representation from the defense attorney as well?
Speaker: Yeah, a lot of times. that You know, defense attorneys, they've got too many cases. About 95% of cases end in guilty pleas. So if you're just part of that system, you're like, okay, this case is going to plead out. Yeah, i mean, it was...
Speaker: Definitely. i would say horrible representation of patients and of other individuals too. So it's on to sentence counsel as well, provided the information is disclosed to them from the prosecution. Yeah. yeah But also prosecutors don't have to disclose evidence that's exculpatory until trial.
Speaker: if someone takes a plea, like patients, they didn't have to turn over information that showed, you know, No, the child didn't die or the fetus didn't, uh, life of the fetus didn't end. The miscarriage didn't happen because of cinnamon or, lifting heavy weights.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sorry, but I got to hear the second story. Uh, so the stillbirth as well. How does that turn into a criminal case? So stillbirths are also faulty forensic evidence, junk science, uh, gender bias, uh,
Speaker: So you you have a woman, we have a lot of these cases, it can who has a stillbirth and either has the stillbirth at the hospital alone, like we have a teenager who went into a bathroom in a hospital and had a stillbirth, or these women have stillbirth at home and then they go to the hospital because they're hemorrhaging. Yeah.
Speaker: ah And at the hospital, the doctors call CPS and they call the police and there starts to be an investigation. So perhaps this person didn't have a stillbirth, but they're a murderer. So how do you prove that a mother is a murderer, that she affirmatively killed this baby? How do you prove it? You rely on junk science. There's this test called the floating lung test, which I kid you not, goes back to 16,
Speaker: And it's been challenged so much and it's still used. So the test is you take a piece of lung from the newborn, from the neonate, and you put it in water.
Speaker: And if the piece of lung floats, then that means that the baby was born and the baby took its first breath and it was breathing, filling up its lungs with air. And then the mother murdered the baby.
Speaker: That's your proof. a floating piece of lung. Now, I'm sure that they have some scientific reason as to why that piece of lung would float in the water, correct? It can't just so... You're not telling me this is essentially the same test that they use to determine if if a woman was a witch or not by throwing it in the river.
Speaker: Like, yeah yeah you're you're telling me that there has to there has to be, i don't know, they're using something from the periodic table, right? They have to be. wow um No, no. I mean, listen, it's better because I don't think women are witches. So, you know, there's not going to be any proof there anyway. Right. But no, this has false positives all the time. Piece of lung might float. and i mean, it's more likely to float. So then you're like, oh, ok that shows Melina's a murderer. No, it's.
Speaker: There's so many problems with it that people from the National Association of Medical Examiners name. They've come out, written letters about it in states where these prosecutions are happening. Medical examiners are testifying to legislators about it. So there's a lot of pushback. ah And on this point, I like to think maybe prosecutors just aren't educated and just don't know. But i it's horrific that they continue to bring this in. So they rely on that and then they try to.
Speaker: Come up again with motive. Like, how do you prove a motive if someone didn't commit a crime? It's pretty hard. yeah So they're like, OK, well, did you get prenatal care? If you didn't get prenatal care, then that's a sign that you intended to murder this baby, even though we have prenatal care deserts, even though there's a lot of reasons it can be hard to get prenatal care. So it's just, again, you have that tunnel vision and you start to just focus in on this is ah a bad woman, a bad wife, a bad mother and deserves to be punished.
Speaker: Yeah, to talk about that point about prenatal care, I have a friend of mine, and she's a Black woman, and she looks great for her age, right? But she was older. And the doctor...
Speaker: marked her down as younger and didn't factor in that she would need special prenatal care because she was 40 plus. and And it wasn't until she spoke to the doctor and was like, wait a minute, aren't I supposed to be do getting this this, this, this, and this? He's like, no, you're what, 32 years old? No, I'm 42 years old. So yeah, that's that's another reason why women might not get proper prenatal care. Well, yeah. And then if something happened to that baby, then that could be held against her.
Speaker: Right. Why didn't you get the prenatal care? Yeah. Speaking of prenatal care, the mothers are losing newborns over drugs the hospital gave them. Yeah. yeah ah The state has a duty to investigate. So where's the line between protecting kids and punishing mothers?
Speaker: Yeah. So we have these pretty vague drug tests in hospitals that, for example, in my local hospital here, you know, I'm in rural Indiana. And in my local hospital, there's definitely been women who have had a C-section or had a difficult birth and got an epidural, which is, know, fentanyl morphine as part of the epidural. And then they have a healthy baby, but they test positive. They themselves test positive in the drug test. And the hospital says, well, we don't know if you came in and you already took those drugs or if it's what we gave you.
Speaker: ah So these drug tests can be really unreliable. Also, if you have a prescription, the prescription could bring it up. ah That could lead to a drug test that, again, separates you from your children, could lead to criminal charges of child abuse,
Speaker: a fetal harm, even when you have a healthy baby. So it's not about, is there an actual harm to a child? It's, well, is there a risk of a possible harm? And yeah, it's important to protect children. But I also think, i so there's a great organization called Movement for Family Power. And I heard their attorney say, okay, so if you're you know, a white upper middle class person, you know, living in the suburbs, what do you think
Speaker: will provide safety for your child. Do you think police coming to your home is going to create safety? Do you think Child Protective Services checking in on you every week, making sure that you are in compliance with XYZ, is that going to create safety? Is that the world that you want?
Speaker: And her point is that a lot of this is really about targeting certain people to surveil them, to control them, and ultimately to punish them and not about creating safety for children.
Speaker: So that's where your book argues that this really is poor people and people are of color are hit the hardest yeah from these type of policies.
Speaker: How can we improve upon that? Because you bring it up, there are prenatal deserts, right? people yeah When people and live in metropolitan cities, they're like, oh, this I can just go down the road and I can get this or that. They don't understand in these rural areas where things are way more spread out.
Speaker: The stuff that you need may not be as easy to get to as it should be. Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you know someone who's, well, to to back up, a couple different things. If you know someone who's criminally charged, try to ah help out the defense. It's something called community defense, ah where community members can say, hey, you might not know Valina Beattie's medical records, she hears this information. She actually has a certain disability or there's something you need know about her. Or you may not know that she is a Sunday school teacher and we have three people who are going to testify and can write reports or letters or videos. about what a good person she is and how great she is around children. can All this additional information and evidence that, as we said, defense attorneys can be overwhelmed, overloaded.
Speaker: And the change, you know, you have to be working on this case before that guilty plea. And a lot of cases end in a guilty plea. So you got to work early on. So that's one thing. Another is nurses and doctors being trained on what their responsibilities are. I mean, Bruce, I appreciate you saying, you know, what about looking out for these babies?
Speaker: And doctors and nurses need to know what's expected as a mandatory reporter and what's not. So bringing police into someone's ah room in the hospital, that's not required of doctors. And in fact, that violates the patient privilege doctor or patient what am I saying? the The privilege between the patient and the doctor of privacy. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: So there's more training by doctors, by nurses, for doctors and nurses, like physicians for reproductive health, ah that really, ok what does this mean? Also, we know that moms who go to ah public hospitals are more likely to be reported. than a mom who goes to her private OB-GYN who says, oh, she tested positive for marijuana. But I know Valina has been having really bad nausea and she's taking that and she's having a healthy pregnancy. I'm not going to call it in.
Speaker: Well, if I to a public hospital where it's just whatever doctor is assigned to you they're like, oh, positive drug scheme, making the call. So these are all things that that could change and that I think need to change.
Speaker: We talked about women. We talked about poor people. But we haven't, outside of the the case with Leah Stubbs, we haven't talked about queer people. Now, queer people are serving decades for crimes that they that never happened. Yeah, yeah. How much of these sentences was about who they were?
Speaker: And what's one rule you change tomorrow about violence? the way we view queer people in the criminal justice system.
Speaker: Yeah. So this is our common thread today, right? that These charges, when there is no crime, it's all about identity and junk science and tunnel vision.
Speaker: And i I hope listeners will remember this next case because she has a hearing in November in Maryland. and Rose Berline Turin. Yeah. And she was 19 years old, a daycare assistant.
Speaker: And this is a black Haitian queer woman. And she's working at the daycare, and she takes eight photos of kiddos with diaper rash to document for her boss.
Speaker: Okay. And for the boss to be able to show it to parents. She never messages the photos, just shows them on the phone itself. She doesn't share the photos.
Speaker: But one of her coworkers... calls the police. And this turns into child pornography charges against Rose Pertlene. Yeah.
Speaker: So this is right down the road for me. So couldn't her boss that she showed the pictures to say, oh, yes, this was documented. Yeah. and And shouldn't that drop the case right then and there?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, this goes back to that tunnel vision that you're like, this had to have been a crime. These photos were taken for sexual gratification, no other purpose. doesn't Again, you're excluding any of the evidence that shows the person is innocent, right? Because you're like, nope, this is ah a bad person, a bad queer, et ah And so they she took it to trial. Right. Of course she did. She was like, i mean, I'm going to win this case. Like, why is a jury possibly going to think that, you know, I'm a daycare worker. I have no history of child abuse. I have one hundred and forty five thousand.
Speaker: photos on my phone and eight of them, the eight diaper rash photos. Those are the only photos I have of children. No searches for child pornography. Again, no sketchy behavior. Nothing. None of the signs that we normally have in child pornography cases. So, of course, she was going to win. But the prosecution argued, um because she's gay or bisexual, that shows she took these photos for sexual gratification. That's what proves it.
Speaker: And the jury agreed, and the judge sentenced her to 126 years in prison. Jesus. and Entire life. What part of Maryland is this in? This has to be in rural Maryland. It is, but it's more that... I thought it was near West Virginia, but it's actually more of a coastal area, but I can i can let you know. Yeah, it's out near Ocean City. Okay. That's just... Wow. a hundred so now You said she's got to a case now, to read a hearing to reopen her case? Yep, yep, which, as I said, that's an uphill battle.
Speaker: But her attorney's trying. She's got attorney with the Office of the Public Spender. He's trying, and it's she has a hearing in November. Yeah. It just seems like when we when America, by and large, generally speaking, looks at the LGBTQ plus community, it demonizes people.
Speaker: before yeah even examining their own biases. and and And from what you're kind of saying, this goes into the justice system where it ah she obviously had to be a child pornographer because she's queer. Yeah. That's... it's that's what That's what they do, right? They're drag queens. We got to make sure that they can't read books to our kids because they're going to harm our kids. Meanwhile, statistics say the person harming your kids is not a queer person. No, straight men. Like 95% straight men. Yes.
Speaker: Yep, straight man. As we know, oh if we pay attention in the news, yeah. Yep, yep. I want to ask you this question because I feel like it's really, really important. And your work with the Innocence Projects and in all of these cases that you're trying to overturn these wrongful convictions, when somebody comes home ah after years inside,
Speaker: For something that they never did, something that never happened, what's one thing that they have to learn to enjoy again? oh So I can think of a couple of things.
Speaker: ah One of them is going to a restaurant where there's a lot of people and sitting at a table where you may not be able to have your back against a wall.
Speaker: you know That could be one thing. But it's something that... stands out to me is I like to shop. It looks like to shop, you know, go to a store. What you going to pick? on a That shopping can be so overwhelming. Like even just picking a deodorant or picking a body wash because you haven't been able to make that choice for how many years.
Speaker: And now there's like you know rows and rows of options. And that that you're just like, I, I have no idea. i have no idea. how to pick.
Speaker: So that that stands out to me, that it's like everything has been so narrowed down in your life that you can only have certain bar of soap and that, you know, when the world opens back up again, and it can be a lot.
Speaker: So the option ah the option of choice becomes overwhelming. Yeah. Wow, that's incredible to think about. All right, Valina, I just want to ask one final question because we've covered a lot today. We've gone all over. This was an ADHD conversation on my part. I'm sorry that I lost a little bit of structure. But what is it that you want to leave the audience with ah today in this conversation?
Speaker: Ah, thanks. There's a couple of things. So one is we're coming up on elections and who you elect as your local prosecutor matters. So not every prosecutor is going to be going after miscarriages and seeing if a miscarriage is an abortion, seeing if it's murder. ah So it matters. It matters who you elect as your local prosecutor. And speaking out to them about, listen, we don't we want you focusing on homicides. You know, like, what, nearly 40% of homicides in the U.S. remain unsolved? Focus on that. Don't focus on, you know, pregnancy behaviors. And the other thing is there's great organizations working on these issues. One is Pregnancy Justice. and Another is Movement for Family Power. So I encourage folks to look them up.
Speaker: And if anyone has questions for me, you can find me ads at Valina Beattie or Valina Beattie author on your social media platforms, your favorite platform. And feel free to reach out to me at Indiana University.
Speaker: Valina, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. This conversation was enlightening. a little, a little disheartening to realize that for somebody who was already a cynic of the criminal justice system, to realize it just a little it's a little bit more deeper, but to also...
Speaker: Be hopeful because there are people like you that are out there fighting for those people that have suffered those injustices. So thank you so much for coming on the show, not only sharing your story, but also sharing your work. I know I've learned a lot and I know my audience will have learned a lot as well. So thank you so much.
Speaker: Yeah, thank you. Before we end, I want to leave you with just one last thought. We opened this show in a hospital room. And after sitting with Valina, I realized this conversation was never really about courtrooms.
Speaker: It was about who gets believed. A mother in Indiana tried to bust through her son's window with a tricycle to save him from a fire. And the prosecution's proof was that she didn't say enough words of regret.
Speaker: A woman in Nevada lost a pregnancy and ended up confessing to lifting heavy weights and eating too much cinnamon. A 19-year-old daycare worker in Maryland took eight diaper rash photos for a boss and got 126 years.
Speaker: And then there is Le'Veon Brooks. He spent close to 20 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. His mother passed less than a year after he came home, and he didn't talk about anger.
Speaker: He said she could finally put her hammer down. Valina says something that stuck with me. Prosecutors get built up like they're not allowed to be wrong. I know one prosecutor that's fictional that I absolutely love, and that's Jack McCoy. He could do no wrong in my eyes, but if you're never allowed to be wrong,
Speaker: You can never be correct. If you want to understand how deep this goes, read her book, Pink Crime, Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity. Not because it's comfortable.
Speaker: Because there are real people, and some of them are still waiting. But here's the uncomfortable part people don't want to talk about. A lot of us are part of this as well.
Speaker: I told y'all I had to make sure that my us my ex-wife documented every bruise from work because I knew what the neighbors would think about a big, bald, Black man and a white woman having bruises on her body.
Speaker: And I'm the same dude who binged forensic files thinking that they got them because it was a good case of junk science that I'm later finding out. But we're the neighbors.
Speaker: We're the jury. We're the folks who skipped the local prosecutor's race. So pay attention to who you elect. Ask the questions. to Check the evidence. Because certainty ain't justice.
Speaker: Sometimes it's just tunnel vision with a badge. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for listening. I want to thank you for watching. And until next time, as always, I'll holler.
Speaker: Woo! That was one hell of a show. Thank you for rocking with us here on Unsolicited Perspectives. If you enjoyed the show, follow, subscribe, like, comment, and share. Catch the video podcast and YouTube exclusives on YouTube. But the real part is on our Patreon and YouTube membership with After Hours Uncensored with my sister. Hit up unsolicitedperspectives.com for merch, blogs, and donation. Every donation goes to improving our equipment. And I want to say thank you, thank you, thank you, and I'll catch you next time. Howdy 5000. Peace.
