A Detroit woman has sued the city and a police detective for being falsely detained using facial recognition technology when she was eight months pregnant, according to court documents.
Porcha Woodruff, 32, was getting her two children ready for school on the morning of February 16 when six police officers showed up at her door and handed her an arrest warrant charging her with theft and theft of a vehicle.
At first, Woodruff thought the officers were joking, given her visible state of pregnancy. She was arrested.
“Ms. Woodruff later discovered that she had been implicated as a suspect through a photographic line-up shown to the robbery and carjacking victim, following an unreliable facial recognition match,” the court documents say.
The victim of the robbery told the police that on January 29 he met a woman with whom he had sexual relations. At some point in the day, she went to a BP gas station, where the woman “interacted with various individuals,” according to the lawsuit.
They then drove to another location, where the victim was held up and robbed at gunpoint by a man the woman had previously interacted with at the BP gas station. The victim told police that she returned her phone at the gas station two days later.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the Eastern Michigan District Court, names Detective LaShauntia Oliver, who was assigned to the case, as a defendant.
When Oliver learned that a woman had returned the victim’s phone to the gas station, he ran the facial technology on the video, which identified her as Woodruff, the lawsuit alleges.
“Detective Oliver fully stated in her report what she observed on the video recording, and there was no mention that the female suspect was pregnant,” the lawsuit states.
When a man driving the victim’s car was pulled over on February 2, Oliver did not show him a photo of Woodruff, according to court documents.
The victim was also shown a lineup of potential suspects and identified Woodruff as the woman she was with when she was robbed. Oliver used an eight-year-old photo of Woodruff at a 2015 arrest lineup, despite having access to his current driver’s license, according to the lawsuit.
The day Woodruff was arrested, she and her fiance urged officers to check the arrest warrant to confirm whether the woman who committed the crime was pregnant, something they refused to do, the lawsuit alleges.
Woodruff was charged with theft and theft of a vehicle and released from the Detroit Detention Center around 7 p.m. on $100,000 personal bond.
Her fiancé took her to a medical center, where she was diagnosed with a low heart rate due to dehydration and told she was having contractions from stress related to the incident.
On March 6, the Wayne County District Attorney’s Office dropped the case for “insufficient evidence,” according to the lawsuit.
Detroit Police Chief James E. White said he has reviewed the allegations in the lawsuit, which he said are “very troubling.”
“We are taking this matter very seriously, but we are unable to comment further at this time due to the need for further investigation,” he said in a statement. “We will provide more information once additional facts are obtained and we have a better understanding of the circumstances.”
Oliver did not respond to requests for comment.
This article was originally published in English by mira alsharif and Cristian Santana for our sister network NBCNews.com. For more from NBC News enter here.
