Woman arrested for car-jacking based on facial recognition software - funny that the victim didn’t mention the car-jacker was 8 months pregnant
Handcuffed in front of her home on a Thursday morning last February, leaving her crying children with her fiancé, Ms. Woodruff was taken to the Detroit Detention Center. She said she was held for 11 hours, questioned about a crime she said she had no knowledge of, and had her iPhone seized to be searched for evidence.
“I was having contractions in the holding cell. My back was sending me sharp pains. I was having spasms. I think I was probably having a panic attack,” said Ms. Woodruff, a licensed aesthetician and nursing school student. “I was hurting, sitting on those concrete benches.”
After being charged in court with robbery and carjacking, Ms. Woodruff was released that evening on a $100,000 personal bond. In an interview, she said she went straight to the hospital where she was diagnosed with dehydration and given two bags of intravenous fluids. A month later, the Wayne County prosecutor dismissed the case against her.
Very nearly a miscarriage of justice in deed.
Shit, that sounds like grounds for a lawsuit. The entire basis for arresting an extremely pregnant woman was face recognition software? That’s bullshit. Who issued that warrant?!
Woodruff was arrested after a man went to Detroit Police and said he was the victim of a carjacking and robbery.
The man told police he had sex with a woman named Trinidad, and afterward, they went to a local gas station, where he said the woman interacted with several individuals, a police report included in the lawsuit shows. After leaving, the victim said he was robbed and carjacked by a man who had been at the gas station.
Woodruff’s attorneys say in the lawsuit that Detroit Police Detective Oliver used facial recognition technology on surveillance footage, which matched Woodruff to the woman in the video.
The lawsuit says that police showed the man a lineup of photos of six women — including an eight-year-old photo of Woodruff — and he identified Woodruff as the woman he was with during the carjacking.
Woodruff’s lawyers allege in the suit that there was no mention of the female suspect being pregnant during Oliver’s interactions with the victim.
Now, if that lawsuit goes through, I’d say that’s justice being brought to term.
An 8 year old photo??? The fuck??
If the story is accurate, the victim’s story is a little…fishy…
I’m more suspect of them using surveillance footage for the facial recognition. Unless they got a close-up of the subject looking straight into a camera, there’s no way that footage would be detailed enough to do facial recognition with anything close to accuracy.
I know that the cameras at the place I work are so bad I wouldn’t recognize my best friend. I can’t believe that facial recognition could accurately make a match. It’s particularly interesting that no one ever mentioned she was pregnant. The victim of the crime had sex with the perpetrator, one would think that 8 mts. pregnant might have come up in his description of her to the police. Conversely, the arresting officers never told the victim that the person he identified, from an 8 year old photo, was 8* mts. pregnant. It makes you wonder if they would have treated a white pregnant woman in such a way. My assumption is no.
*Completely non-sequitur: 8 is an oddly specific number in this story.
What’s he ashamed of? Could it be he’s ashamed of their pleading, but not of the torture?
I’m confused as to why she pleaded guilty, if indeed she wasn’t involved in the murder and was in fact herself a victim of trafficking from the killer. Something doesn’t seem right here.
At a guess, I haven’t opened the articles. But there was sufficient evidence that it was a revenge killing instead of self defense.
ETA: i.e. She went outside of his area of control, acquired a weapon, then returned and killed him.
Are you sure about that?
The district attorney’s office said in the news release that Aguilera Baldenegro, Martinez and Trevino lured Murillo and another man, Christian Lobo, to the apartment. There, Aguilera Baldenegro and Martinez beat the two men with handguns and robbed them, and Aguilera Baldenegro ultimately shot and killed Murillo, authorities have said.
Aguilera Baldenegro’s attorney told the Star-Telegram in 2020 that Aguilera Baldenegro shot and killed Murillo after he grabbed Trevino by the throat. The attorney, David Finn, also said that Trevino was not a trafficking victim and that he knew what to look for through his experience as a federal prosecutor who tried trafficking cases.
Nobody is alleging that she killed anyone herself. She wasn’t armed. She was charged because authorities said she was used to lure the victims, including the one who was murdered. Did you read about the wrong case?
In any event, she had originally been assigned a public defender, but then got attorneys who had civil rights experience, and the best they could do was a plea deal. So I suspect she didn’t have much if any evidence that she was a trafficking victim.
If her claims were true this is horrible, but I have trouble reconciling that with a guilty plea.
No. As I stated in the first place, I haven’t read the articles. I was just positing a theory about why taking that plea deal was her safest outcome.
Ah, okay. No, your theory had nothing to do with what happened. 
What the everlovin’ hell?
2 bullys beat a kid to death. And get probation.
He spectated that they would meet more “mature and sophisticated criminals” who would be a bad influence on them.
Bad influence? They are already killers!
I can only assume “mature and sophisticated criminals” means black kids.
Dirty cop lies to suspect, coerces false confession, then pollutes police lineup identification.
But WTF?? We had DNA science in 1995!!! Why did they not test it???
And as an added tragedy, the real rapists went free.