Joshua Spriestersbach, a homeless man in Hawaii, spent over two years wrongfully locked up in a state psychiatric hospital because of a case of mistaken identity. Now, the City and County of Honolulu has agreed to pay him $975,000 to settle his lawsuit.
The ordeal began in 2011 when Spriestersbach was sleeping at Kawananakoa Middle School and a police officer asked for his name. He only gave his grandfather’s surname, Castleberry, which matched a 2009 warrant for a man named Thomas Castleberry. According to The Independent, despite Spriestersbach’s immediate protests that he was not the person they were looking for, the officer arrested him.
In 2015, Honolulu Police Department (HPD) officers took his fingerprints, which confirmed he was not Thomas Castleberry. However, according to a lawsuit Spriestersbach filed in 2021, the police department’s records were never properly updated after this confirmation. According to the complaint, he at first refused to provide his name to the officer but eventually complied.
The failure to fix a known mistake led to years of wrongful detention
That uncorrected error ultimately led to his 2017 arrest. At the time, Spriestersbach, then 55, had been waiting for food outside a Chinatown facility and fell asleep on the sidewalk. An HPD officer, acting on Castleberry’s outstanding warrant, arrested him once again.
He was initially held for four months at the O‘ahu Community Correctional Center before being transferred to the Hawai‘i State Hospital, a psychiatric facility. Spriestersbach remained there for more than two years, finally being released on January 17, 2020.
According to his complaint, Spriestersbach argues that multiple parties, including police officers, public defenders, and health workers, had repeated opportunities to correct the error but failed to take action. The lawsuit claims that, leading up to his release in January 2020, no one took steps to verify the information he provided or to confirm that he was, in fact, telling the truth, reports the Daily Mail.
Instead, “they determined that Joshua was delusional and incompetent simply because he refused to admit he was Thomas R. Castleberry and refused to acknowledge Castleberry’s crimes.” Cases of police misconduct leading to serious harm are not as rare as many people would like to believe.
The legal action further argues that the city’s inability to accurately identify homeless individuals and to correct erroneous records was “the moving force” behind Spriestersbach’s wrongful arrest and prolonged detention.
In filings, the Hawai‘i Innocence Project emphasized that responsibility does not lie with a single entity, noting that police officers, public defenders, the state attorney general’s office, and hospital staff all “share in the blame for this gross miscarriage of justice.”
The truth only came out after a psychiatrist at the hospital prompted a closer review of his case, which led to a fingerprint verification that confirmed he was not the man named in the warrant. A majority of Honolulu council members approved the $975,000 city settlement. Spriestersbach may also receive an additional $200,000 from the state to resolve claims against the Hawai’i public defender’s office, bringing his total potential compensation to over $1.1 million.
Today, Spriestersbach lives quietly with his sister on her 10-acre property in Vermont. Despite being free, he remains fearful of leaving the property, haunted by the possibility that he could be arrested again due to the same mistaken identity that upended his life years earlier.
His ordeal has shone a spotlight on broader concerns about how authorities handle identification and personal records, echoing other incidents in which ordinary citizens have found themselves at the mercy of bureaucratic errors – such as a woman who called police after surveillance footage made her feel her privacy had been violated by a store manager.
Published: Mar 31, 2026 01:11 pm