A Detroit woman has filed a lawsuit against the city and a police detective after she was wrongfully arrested due to facial recognition technology while she was eight months pregnant, as stated in court documents.
Porcha Woodruff, 32, was preparing her two children for school on the morning of February 16th when six police officers arrived at her doorstep, presenting her with an arrest warrant accusing her of robbery and carjacking. Initially, Woodruff thought the officers were joking due to her visibly pregnant condition, but she was arrested.
“Ms. Woodruff later discovered that she was implicated as a suspect through a photo lineup shown to the victim of the robbery and carjacking, following an unreliable facial recognition match,” according to the court documents.
The robbery victim informed the police that on January 29th, he had encountered a woman with whom he had engaged in sexual activity. They visited a BP gas station where the woman interacted with several individuals, as outlined in the lawsuit.
Subsequently, they went to another location where the woman had earlier interacted with a man at the BP gas station, who later robbed and carjacked the victim at gunpoint. The victim reported that his phone was returned to the gas station two days later. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for Eastern Michigan on Thursday, names Detective LaShauntia Oliver, who was handling the case, as a defendant.
Detective Oliver, upon learning that a woman had returned the victim’s phone to the gas station, used facial recognition technology on the video footage, identifying the woman as Woodruff, according to the lawsuit.
“Detective Oliver provided a detailed description in her report of what she observed in the video footage, without mentioning the pregnancy of the female suspect,” the lawsuit states.
When a man was apprehended while driving the victim’s car on February 2nd, Detective Oliver allegedly failed to show him a photo of Woodruff, as per court documents.
During a lineup of potential suspects, the victim identified Woodruff as the woman he was with during the robbery. The lawsuit claims that Detective Oliver included an eight-year-old photo of Woodruff from a 2015 arrest in the lineup, despite having access to her current driver’s license.
