ABSTRACT
Innocent people in the LGBTQ+ community are wrongly arrested, criminally charged, and even wrongly convicted because of their identities. False labels of dangerous, degenerate, depraved, deviant, and violent shape how appearance is interpreted and how queer identity is criminalized, regardless of whether the individual committed a crime or any harm. These labels are particularly salient when used by the media. This chapter provides examples of wrongful convictions where the media reiterated these tropes and then later, through investigative journalism, unpacked these false narratives. The media ultimately helped to reverse these wrongful convictions and challenge the biased criminalization of LGBTQ+ individuals, as well as the faulty forensic evidence used against them at trial. The chapter describes the case of the San Antonio Four, as well as the case of Leigh Stubbs and Tami Vance, both as examples of queer women wrongly convicted based on a toxic combination of homophobia, gender bias, and false evidence presented in court as “scientific.” This powerful combination still wrongly incarcerates queer women today.
