A homeless man who was wrongfully arrested and spent two years in a Hawaiian mental hospital is petitioning the courts to have his record cleared following his release in January 2020.
In 2017, a police officer in Hawaii mistook Joshua Spriestersbach for another man, Thomas Castleberry, who violated his probation relating to a 2006 drug offense. After more than two years spent in a mental institution, a psychiatrist requested a detective to compare photos and fingerprints between the two subjects, revealing that Spriestersbach was wrongfully arrested.
Spriestersbach, 50, is now working with the Hawaii Innocence Project, a legal nonprofit group seeking to amend the records following his arrest in 2017, according to the Associated Press.
“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,'” said Vedanta Griffith, Spriestersbach’s sister who spent 16 years searching for her brother. “So, they used that as saying he was delusional, as justification for keeping him.”
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A petition was filed in court Monday requesting a judge to vacate the arrest and to correct the records for Spriestersbach. The filings described the unique incident that began with him falling asleep on a sidewalk while waiting in line for food outside a Honolulu shelter in 2017.
An officer woke Spriestersbach up, leading him to think he was being arrested under the city’s ban for sitting or laying down on public sidewalks. He did not realize that the officer mistook him for Castleberry.
Attorneys for Spriestersbach argued the situation could have been resolved by simply comparing the two men’s photographs and fingerprints.
“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 H.S.H. staff and doctors and heavily medicated,” the petition said.
The petition added that the real Castleberry has been incarcerated in an Alaska prison since 2016.
Spriestersbach is no longer homeless and lives with Griffith in Vermont. The man spent two years and eight months in the institution before he was let free.
Griffith said her brother now refuses to leave her 10-acre property, fearful that “they’re going to take him again.”
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The Washington Examiner contacted the Hawaii Innocence Project but did not immediately receive a response.
