Hawaii officials wrongly arrested a homeless man for a crime committed by someone else, locked him up in a state hospital for more than two years, forced him to take psychiatric drugs and then tried to cover up the mistake by quietly setting him free, the Hawaii Innocence Project said in a court document on Monday that asked a judge to set the record straight.
A petition filed in court asks a judge to vacate the arrest and correct Joshua Spriestersbach’s records.
The filing lays out his bizarre plight that started with him falling asleep on a sidewalk. He was houseless and hungry while waiting in a long line for food outside a Honolulu shelter on a hot day in 2017.
Photo: AP
When a police officer roused him awake, he thought he was being arrested for the city’s ban on sitting or laying down on public sidewalks, but what he did not realize was that the officer mistook him for a man named Thomas Castleberry, who had a warrant out for his arrest for violating probation in a 2006 drug case.
It is unclear how this happened, as Spriestersbach and Castleberry had never met. Spriestersbach somehow ended up with Castleberry as his alias, even though Spriestersbach never claimed to be Castleberry, the Hawaii Innocence Project said.
Spriestersbach’s attorneys argue it all could have been cleared up if police simply compared the two men’s photographs and fingerprints.
Instead, against Spriestersbach’s protests that he was not Castleberry, he was eventually committed to the Hawaii State Hospital (HSH).
“Yet, the more Mr Spriestersbach vocalized his innocence by asserting that he is not Mr Castleberry, the more he was declared delusional and psychotic by the HSH staff and doctors, and heavily medicated,” the petition said. “It was understandable that Mr Spriestersbach was in an agitated state when he was being wrongfully incarcerated for Mr Castleberry’s crime.”
No one believed him — not even his public defenders — until a hospital psychiatrist finally listened.
All it took were simple Google searches and a few telephone calls to verify that Spriestersbach was on another island when Castleberry was initially arrested, the court document said.
The psychiatrist asked a detective to come to the hospital, who verified fingerprints and photographs to determine that the wrong man had been arrested and Spriestersbach spent two years and eight months institutionalized, the petition said, adding that it was not difficult to determine that the real Castleberry has been incarcerated in an Alaska prison since 2016.
Records show that a 49-year-old man named Thomas R Castleberry is in the Spring Creek Correctional Facility in Seward, Alaska.
The Hawaii Innocence Project document also said that Spriestersbach had ineffective counsel — the Hawaii public defender’s office.
Once the fingerprints and photographs were verified, officials moved quickly, but secretly, to release Spriestersbach in January last year, the petition said.
“A secret meeting was held with all of the parties, except Mr Spriestersbach, present. There is no court record of this meeting or no public court record of this meeting. No entry or order reflects this miscarriage of justice that occurred or a finding that Mr Spriestersbach is not Thomas Castleberry,” the document said.
His lawyers said that officials did not think anyone would believe Spriestersbach or no one would care about the homeless man who fell asleep waiting for food, only to wake up to a living nightmare.
Spriestersbach, 50, who lives with his sister in Vermont, declined to comment for this story.
His sister, Vedanta Griffith, spent nearly 16 years looking for him. He moved to Hawaii with Griffith when her husband was stationed on Oahu with the US Army in 2003. He moved to the Big Island and then disappeared, while facing mental health issues, she said.
“Part of what they used against him was his own argument: ‘I’m not Thomas Castleberry. I didn’t commit these crimes... This isn’t me,’” she told reporters. “So they used that as saying he was delusional, as justification for keeping him.”
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