Criminal - That’s Not Me

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

Porcha Woodruff was eight months pregnant when she was arrested by police one morning at her home in Detroit. When she spoke with a detective at the police station hours later, she asked them, “Why am I here?” Say hello on ⁠Facebook⁠, ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠. Sign up for our ⁠occasional newsletter⁠. Follow the show and review us on ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠. ⁠Sign up for Criminal Plus⁠ to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make ⁠This is Love⁠ and ⁠Phoebe Reads a Mystery⁠. Artwork by ⁠Julienne Alexander⁠. Check out ⁠our online shop⁠. Episode transcripts are posted on ⁠our website⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On the morning of February 16th, 2023, Portia Woodruff was getting her two daughters ready for school. I was brushing my daughter's hair up, and I heard a loud bang at the door. I was upstairs when I heard it, so I went downstairs, myself and my youngest daughter went downstairs, and when I went to the door and kind of peeked out,

It was the officer standing at the door. A police officer from the Detroit Police Department. She said, are you Portia Woodruff? I said, yes. She said, well, I have a warrant for your arrest. And I was like, okay, no, you have to be mistaken. What do you mean? You have a warrant for my arrest. She said, no, we have a warrant for your arrest. I would need you to step outside.

You can go with us, and I'm like, well, no, what's going on? The officer told Portia that she was being arrested. arrested for robbery and carjacking. I'm like, can you tell me when this happened? She's like, oh, well, it happened last year. In addition to the officer at her door, Portia saw that there were five other police officers outside her house, in her driveway and on the street.

Portia told her daughter to go and wake up her fiancé. She also called her mother. I said, Mom, they're here. They say they have a warrant for my arrest. I don't know what's going on. Portia's mother told her she should look at the warrant. When Portia read it, she noticed that the robbery and carjacking she was being accused of hadn't happened the year before. It had happened just a few weeks earlier, and Portia was about to have a baby.

And clearly, you're eight months pregnant, you're visibly pregnant. Yes, yes. We were kind of going back and forth, and they weren't listening to me. My mom's like, hey, you might want to look at the paperwork. There's no way. And then once my child's father came down, like, hey, what are you guys talking about? What's going on? They were disregarding everything everyone said.

So, of course, my children were there. My youngest started crying, you know, my oldest daughter, she's looking at me, you know, but trying to calm her sister down at the same time. And it's like, okay, what's going on? My mom's pregnant, and the police are trying to take her away. I was frightened, too, but I'm to the point, like, I'm helpless because what can I do? nothing. I'm saying that it's not, they're not taking it in, basically. Portia agreed to go with the officers.

I was handcuffed in front of my children. They walked me off the porch. They handcuffed me in front of, like, in the middle of the street, and then they placed me in the police car. She was driven to the Detroit detention center and put into a holding cell. Their guards speaking to me like, hey, you're pregnant. What are you doing here? I'm like, hey, I don't know. I have no clue. I have no idea. I didn't even speak to a detective until they arrested me or maybe around seven or eight.

I didn't speak to a detective to maybe 12, one. Police later admitted they knew quickly after Portia's arrival at the police station that she couldn't have been the person they were looking for because of her pregnancy and also because of a large tattoo of a rose on Porsche's arm, which didn't match the suspect's description. They questioned her anyway. She asked me about a tattoo, she asked me about a location, she asked me about the color of a vehicle,

she asked me where was I at the day that the incident happened, how many months I was, if I knew a victim and another suspect, if I frequently visit a certain gas station, And she asked me a series of questions, and then after she asked, well, do you have any questions for me? And I'm like, of course, why am I here? And what did she say? Her response was, oh, well, the victim chose a photo of you that was picked up from a video at the gas station.

Police had run a picture of a female suspect taken from a surveillance video through their AI-powered facial recognition system. She said the data page brings up photos and sometimes it'll bring up the wrong photo and unfortunately things like this happen. And then I'm like, wow, are you serious? I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. A little more than two weeks earlier, on the evening of January 29th, 2003,

a man named Lawrence Walker called 911. He told the dispatcher that he'd been carjacks at gunpoint. He said two people, a man and a woman, were involved. His phone and his wallet were in his car when it was stolen. Lawrence Walker had spent some time with the woman who was involved in the carjacking, although he didn't know her well. He had picked her up earlier that day and said they had drank together, and he thought she might have drugged him. He described as a black female with brown and blonde long hair and a slim build. He said her name was Trinidad. Two days after reporting the carjacking, Lawrence Walker told the police that his cell phone

had been dropped off at a gas station. An officer went to the gas station and watched surveillance footage and saw that the woman dropping off the phone matched the description of the woman involved in the carjacking. The police officer took a screenshot of the woman in the gas station surveillance video. In the image, she's wearing a hat that covers her forehead and eyebrows. They ran this image

through their face recognition system. Doug McMillan is a reporter for the Washington Post. It's actually a system that's controlled by the state of Michigan, and they send a still image to an examiner. in a lab who runs us through an AI-powered software system. The system generally comes back with not one result or not a few results.

They generally come back with hundreds of results, and that examiner goes through and selects who they think might be the best match or the best fit for that potential suspect. In this case, the software identified 73 photos in the system as potential matches. An examiner narrowed it down further to just one potential match, Portia Woodruff. That examiner sent that potential match to the Detroit police investigator with the disclaimer, like they always do, that this is just a possible lead, and this is not definitely the suspect, that it's just a potential match, and that that police person needs to go and take additional investigative steps.

to make sure it is the right person before making an arrest. Police created a photo lineup for Lawrence Walker to look at. It included Porsche's mugshot, which had been taken eight years earlier. When Lawrence Walker saw the photo lineup, he picked out Porsche's picture. The officer, conducting the investigation, asked him, Are you sure this is the person? Lawrence Walker said yes. But the problem with that is that this facial recognition software is so good at finding somebody who looks like the perpetrator.

That's what this machine is built to do, that if it finds somebody who looks like the perpetrator and isn't the perpetrator, that potential suspect is going to fool witnesses. It's going to fool police investigators. and it could even fool a judge and jury, ultimately, because what they've come back with is a look-alike person and not the real suspect. Portia Woodruff stayed in custody until that evening. She was arraigned and released on a $100,000 bond. The police also kept her cell phone.

Portia says they told her they wanted to check her phone records to confirm that she wasn't at the crime scene. Portia went straight from the jail to the emergency. emergency room. She said she'd been having contractions. She got checked out, got IV fluids, and went home in the middle of the night. When you got home, what's the conversation that you had with your kids like? I talked to them a long while about just me trying to explain to them like, you know, not things like this happen, things like this are not supposed to happen and still try to have them have some type of trust for, you know, police officers because my youngest is like,

Mom, they're supposed to help us. You know, we're supposed to call them when we're in trouble. If something bad is happening, you didn't do anything bad. You didn't do anything wrong. Why did they take you? Over the next few weeks, Portia had multiple court hearings before the case was eventually dropped. Here it is. I'm waiting on the arrival of my son, but the biggest thing that I have done.

going on is trying to see about a case getting dismissed that I have no idea about and shouldn't even be going to court for it to begin with. Portia Woodruff was the first woman in the U.S. known to be wrongfully accused of a crime because of a facial recognition search. The ACLU says more than a dozen people in the U.S. have had this happen to them in recent years, and stories keep surfacing. A Florida man says he was wrongfully arrested after local police used AI facial recognition technology. He spent 17 months in jail for a crime that an artificial intelligence program said he committed.

Police in Fargo, North Dakota used an AI facial recognition hit to tie her to a bank fraud case, despite her saying she'd never been to the state. The very first documented case of this kind of mistaken identity happened in 2012. also in Detroit. A man named Robert Williams was at work at an automotive supply company when he got a call from the Detroit Police. They told him to come to the station, to turn himself in. He thought it was a joke.

When he got home later, a police car pulled into his driveway behind him. He was taken away in handcuffs. Police wouldn't tell him or his family why he was under arrest. He spent the night in jail. A cellmate told him he had overheard officers saying he was being accused of stealing watches. The next day, detectives showed him a still image, showing a man dressed in black,

wearing a red hat, standing in front of a watch display. He said, so that's not you? I say, no, that's not me. This is Robert Williams, testifying in front of Congress. He turns over another piece of favor. He says, so I guess that's not. you either. I held that piece of paper

up to my face and said, I hope you don't think all black people look like. He turned over another paper and said, so I guess the computer got it wrong. Robert Williams was eventually released, and the case against him was dropped. He later wrote

about his arrest, I felt like I was in a bad movie. I couldn't leave. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Thanks to Squarespace. for their support.

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That's ritual.com slash criminal for 25% off your first month. your first month. In the 1960s, a computer scientist named Woody Bledsoe started working on a system of measurements that could help computers recognize faces in photos. According to a profile in Wired magazine, Woody Bledso had his teenage son and a friend go through photos of about 50 people, measuring how long their ears were or the width of their mouth. That data was then entered into a computer to see if the computer could match the information to a face and a set of photographs. Their initial goal was to teach a computer to recognize ten faces. It was rumored that Woody Bloodsoe's research was funded by the CIA.

He eventually taught a computer to successfully recognize hundreds of white male faces, and in the 1980s, he used his research when he was hired as an expert witness. in a criminal trial. His testimony, which showed that an image taken from a surveillance video did not match the defendant on trial because their noses were different sizes led to the defendant being acquitted of several crimes. Today, Woody Bloodsoe is considered one of the founders of artificial intelligence.

When did police start to use this technology? It's not completely new. This has been used in some form. by some police for more than two decades. In Florida, there's a sheriff called the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office that has been using facial recognition in some form for more than two decades. But the technology was pretty bad, and it was very kind of unreliable. In 2018, the ACLU ran a test using a facial recognition software made by Amazon, called Recognition.

They uploaded a photo of every member of the U.S. House and Senate and compared them with 25,000 publicly available arrest photos. The software incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress with arrest photos. Almost 40% of those incorrect matches were people of color. A year later, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, looked at a number of different facial recognition programs and found higher rates of false identifications for Asian, African-American, and Native American people

versus white people. It also had a harder time correctly identifying women than men. But a 2025 study by NIST found that the error rate has fallen dramatically in recent years. You really started to kind of get these magical moments, where you can really see demos of this technology working incredibly well. And all you need to do is put in a picture. You can even test it on yourself.

You can put in a picture of yourself. And it'll magically grab images from all over the Internet that maybe you don't even know existed. Okay. I'm recording. All right. So, okay. I'm uploading a picture of me. straight on headshot.

I am wearing makeup. I'm going to accept that I'm over 18. And I'm going to start searching. It's saying it's searching for... Okay, so what has come up here is a lot of pictures of me. These are pictures. A lot of... I've never seen some of these pictures before.

So I'm seeing here probably... 50 pictures of me from all different types of photo shoots, pictures that people have taken of me in a professional setting, headshots, but then also pictures that I don't know of me on stage. I'd say there's probably 50 pictures of me up here. It does have this very incredible, almost uncanny ability to scour the internet or scour a database of images to find somebody who looks like you

or somebody who is you. And I think police, in a time when they're very strapped for resources, this is a very promising and alluring tool for helping them solve some of the most difficult crimes. Some of the most difficult crimes you could think of are ones where the only witness was a video camera. The problem is, you know, we don't actually know how effective it is.

When the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, test facial recognition programs, it uses two high-quality images of front-facing people. The Federation of American Scientists says these are, quote, relatively ideal conditions, and that in the real world, error rates might be much higher. In very perfect conditions, when you essentially have a yearbook photo of somebody with perfect lighting, who is perfectly framed with their face facing forward, facial recognition is very good at identifying the right person in that setting. But that's not how police are using these tools. In the wild, the photos that are often getting used in a law enforcement context are really low quality.

Caitlin Roll works as a public defender. The software could get better and better and better. It could get exponentially better. But if what you're putting in is a grainy black and white surveillance photo taken from overhead where someone's looking to the side and wearing a beanie, it doesn't matter how good the technology is because the software just can't do a good job comparing it. Eight years ago, Caitlin was working in the Bronx and was assigned a client who had been charged with robbery in the first degree.

The robbery had happened at a T.J. Max. Caitlin says surveillance video showed someone stealing some socks. And then, when a security guard approached them, the person waved a box cutter at them and left. A few months later, Caitlin's client was picked up by the police. I just couldn't figure out why they connected him to this robbery. He didn't make any statement saying that he had done this. There was nobody found the socks. He didn't leave something that belonged to him.

It was just an arrest months later. So I called the prosecutor and said, why do you think my guy did this? And he said, you're never going to believe this, Caitlin. They used facial recognition. It was the first time that Caitlin had heard about someone being identified this way. She started digging into the case to figure out what had happened.

So the police went to that T.J. Max and they pulled surveillance video. And when they pulled surveillance video, they talked to the loss prevention officer, and what they told him was we have this fancy new facial recognition software we're going to run this surveillance through. The NYPD then ran a still image from the video through the software. Caitlin says it was a black and white image taken from above. The person was wearing a hat. Caitlin's client came up as one of the possible matches. The police took a screen grab of just my client's mugshot

and they text-messaged it to the loss prevention officer. And what they said was, is this the person who robbed you? The security guard texted back. Yes, this was the person who robbed the store. What was particularly concerning and interesting in this case is that we had a very good but not perfect alibi for where he was. that day. What was it? So his baby boy was born that day. We had photos of him in the hospital. We had the birth certificate that he was on. We showed all of that to the prosecution. The problem is

that the birth time was a couple hours different than the time that the socks were stolen. So is it theoretically possible he was sitting there through the birth of his child and thought, you know what, I'm going to run to T.J. Max and steal some white socks. It's possible, but it's deeply, deeply unlikely. And we were in this tricky spot where both the police and the prosecution who do not understand this technology were sort of saying, well, yeah, sure, you've got that. But, you know, in their minds like facial recognition couldn't have got it wrong. There's a phenomenon that researchers talk about that's called algorithmic bias. When you have a very fancy, expensive machine and you put it in front of these police officers and it gives them a result, they are likely to believe that that is the right person, that the computer must be telling me the right person because, you know, it's a very fancy machine and it's a very expensive machine. and that is going to be probably be the suspect that we're looking for. And so when police get that result, they do seem to go out of their way to try to find that person guilty. And they do sometimes forget to take other investigative steps that you normally would, like interviewing witnesses,

going to check, you know, financial records and bank accounts, going to, you know, do basic police work that all police have been. trained to do. Once they get this AI results, some of this seems to go out the door and they sometimes get blinders on where they're just kind of focusing on how do we get this person in custody. How do we get this person prosecuted? Caitlin says she thinks her client would have had a strong case at trial. But he had a new baby and he could have sat in jail for a very long time waiting for that trial. So ultimately he took the plea. How long was he in jail for? about six months.

Caitlin Ruhl says since this case, she's worked on other cases where facial recognition technology has been used by police, typically using surveillance photos. But she suspects it's being used more often than she and other defense attorneys know about. Police generally do not disclose

when they're using this technology. In most places in the country, police are not required to say that they've used facial recognition in this way to identify a suspect. I went through hundreds of police reports from departments all over the country where they're using these tools.

We knew from internal logs that they were using this technology. But when we read the police reports, nine times out of ten, they were not anywhere explicitly saying facial recognition technology. At most, they were usually saying we used investigative techniques

to identify this person. So therefore, most of the time, the defendants have no idea if they were identified using this machine. So ultimately, you know, there could be people who were taken to trial. There could be people who were convicted. There could be even people who accepted plea deals, people who are behind bars right now who are misidentified by facial recognition, and we don't even know about it.

So maybe there are dozens or maybe there are even hundreds more of people who are wrongly identified this way. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Kachava. Kachava is a shake that can help with your energy, digestion, immunity, and more. You can add it to your daily smoothie, like I do, or you can take their travel packs with you on your summer travels. You can just throw one in your bag and get all the nutrition your body needs in one simple-to-go pack. One packet provides lots of protein, fiber, vitamins, and minerals, greens, probiotics,

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That's Kachava, K-A-V-A-V-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-R-C-C-C-RIN. Support for Criminal comes from TaskRabbit. If you find yourself with a growing to-do list this summer, TaskRabbit can help. TaskRabbit connects you with skilled people, or taskers in your area, who can help you with moving, furniture assembly, home repairs, yard work, mounting, and more. You can set up a search based on costs, skill set, availability, and past client reviews, so you know exactly who's showing up and can feel confident they know what they're doing. I recently needed help assembling and mounting a shelving system in my recording studio,

and I found someone on TaskRabbit who got the job done quickly and efficiently. When life happens, your to-do list grows. Get ahead of it now and get $15 off your first task at taskrabbit.com or on the TaskRabbit app using promo code criminal. Taskers book up fast, especially for same-day tasks, so book trusted home help today. That's $15 off your first task using promo code criminal with the TaskRabbit app or at taskrabbit.com. My understanding is that we were the first defense side to use AI and facial recognition to help exonerate someone.

Christopher O'Brien is a criminal defense attorney based in Fort Myers, Florida. In 2019, he took on a client named Andrew Conlon. Andrew had been in a high-speed car accident with his friend Colton Hassett. Their car was going about 100 miles an hour when it went out of control, hitting lamp posts and trees. The car, you know, spun violently and flung Colton out the window and he died in some bushes.

The car then caught on fire. Andrew was trapped inside. A bystander helped get him out through the driver's side of the car and later talked with police. He told them that Andrew had been the passenger in the car. Did anybody see what happened? Any of you guys see what happened? The driver took off, but he got an ejected from one of the windows.

Wait, that's not the driver? No, he was a passenger. But the police didn't ask for the bystander's name or contact information. Never asked him his name, a phone number. Never asked him, hey buddy, can you stick around a little? I'd like to talk to you some more. Seems like, you know, you're an important witness. Police kept talking with other people at the scene.

the scene, who said they thought Andrew had been seated in the driver's seat. At one point, police also thought that Andrew said he had been the driver. He said they misheard him. Andrew maintained that he had been the passenger, not the driver. But more than two years later, he was charged with vehicular homicide. It's a second-degree felony, which is punishable by up to 15 years of prison. When Christopher O'Brien saw that there was body camera footage of someone saying his client had not been driving, he wanted to find that person.

We didn't know who it was, but he was in an orange cutoff shirt that said event security. It was a bright orange shirt, so, I mean, he's pretty, you know, he stood out. They made flyers and put them around the area and ran a social media campaign. No one turned up. They worked on the case for more than two years. Christopher O'Brien was working with another defense lawyer named Patrick Bailey,

who wondered if they could use facial recognition technology to find the bystander. They tried using free software, but it wasn't helpful. Instead, they wanted to use something called Clearview AI. Clearview AI is a facial recognition company that works primarily with government agencies, like law enforcement and the military. It works by scraping billions of images off every corner of the Internet, including social media platforms. It's controversial, and has faced privacy lawsuits across the globe. Patrick Bailey wrote to the CEO and asked for a license to use a software. He said,

quote, I am aware that your company only provides facial recognition software. to law enforcement agencies. What happens if those same agencies refuse to use Clearview AI's important and powerful software to identify an eyewitness that could clear an innocent person? This stuff is available to cops.

The state attorney's office and these cops could have done that. They could have run his face and found him if they wanted. But they had plenty witnesses who said Mr. Conlin climbed out the driver's door and they were happy with that. The CEO of Clearview AI said he would let them use the software.

So we fed it in with the still picture that we had been disseminating around town and on Facebook and so on. We put that picture in and Clearview AI popped up like 30 pictures of the guy within like seconds. I mean, it was insane how quickly it popped up these pictures of him. One of which was him in the orange event security shirt, the exact same one he was wearing on the night. I was like, that's him.

I mean, that's the guy. One of the photos showed the man dancing at a club in Tampa. They later learned that his name is Vincent. The photo is clear. You can see which club and who he was dancing with. So we called up the club and they said that they didn't know Vincent, but they knew the other guy. and so we got in touch with that guy, the friend,

and then apparently that friend got in touch with Vincent because one morning we were here at the office and the phone rang and it was, hey, I hear you guys are looking for me. We were like, no way. It was like hitting the lottery, finding this guy. Vincent had moved away to St. Augustine, so he hadn't seen any of the social media posts or flyers. He agreed to give a deposition about the accident.

One of the questions the state asked Vincent, he's now they're asking, well, why do you think he's the passenger? And he's like, well, I went up to the car, looked in the driver's door, and he was in the passenger seat. His feet were down in the well, like where the passenger's feet go.

And I tried to pull him out, and he wouldn't come. And I had to finagle. Those were his words. I had to finagle him out. So once they heard that, and the prosecutor looked at him, he's like, how are we going to argue? with that.

The state dropped the charges against Andrew Conlin. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers calls facial recognition technology unregulated, untested, and flawed, and wrote that this case, quote, does not override the larger issues that facial recognition introduces into the criminal legal system. Clearview AI has Andrew Conlin's story up on their website, One supervising attorney who works at legal aid called it a PR stunt.

Christopher O'Brien says he would use facial recognition technology again if it became available to defense lawyers. But he also thinks it should be used with caution by everyone. We shouldn't just abdicate our human sense of morality and just basically good common sense that we have and just abdicate it off to some tech and go, well, the text says X, so X is the answer. I'm very against that.

My pregnancy was the only thing that really saved me. I would have been still fighting the case as we speak now, probably, or already in jail doing sign for something I didn't do. Portia Woodruff. I felt like if the detective had just came, hey, let me go and visit her and knock on her door and talk to her and ask her these questions that could have been avoided. It was just complete carelessness all the way through.

What do you hope happens going forward? I hope that with this type of case, you know, sometimes I feel like they feel like, okay, where they're out, they're not locked up, so that's good enough for them. And honestly, that's how I felt like they're, okay, where at least you're not locked up. And it's like, okay, I shouldn't have been thought about being locked up. I'm not doing anything wrong for me to be in prison or in jail for anything. So for that to happen and then you throw it up like, oh, well, things like this happen, to who? Why? Six months after Portia Woodruff's arrest, the Detroit chief of police said that it was, quote, human error that led to Porsche's arrest, not the facial recognition system.

He said he apologized to Portia Woodruff and her. her family. He did say it was lazy police work. He was absolutely right. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Zedico, Lily Clark, and Lena Sillison. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Cedarborg. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustration for each episode of Criminal, you can see them at this iscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at this iscriminal.com slash newsletter.

We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This Is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery, without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spore, talking about everything from how we make our episodes to the crime stories, caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com slash criminal. We're on Facebook at This is Criminal and Instagram and TikTok at Criminal underscore podcast.

We're also on YouTube at YouTube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.