By Matt Agorist
August 09, 2021"Information
Clearing House" - Every time Joshua
Spriestersbach tried telling the doctors, nurses,
and staff at a state hospital in Hawaii that they had
the wrong man, no one listened and his protests
were answered with drugs. After nearly three years,
the blithering idiots running the hospital finally
figured out their blunder and instead of fixing
their mistake, they covered it up by quietly kicking
Spriestersbach out on the street with only 50 cents
to his name.
The Hawaii Innocence project is now representing
Spriesterbach and this week they asked the court to
correct this innocent man’s life. The filing by the
Innocence Project explains how the state was looking
for a man named Thomas Castleberry and grabbed the
first person they saw instead, Spriesterbach.
According to the report, at the time,
Spriesterbach was homeless and hungry and was
waiting in a food line in 2017 outside of a Honolulu
shelter. The line was long and he fell asleep only
to be roused awake by a cop who was arresting him.
Spriesterbach though he was being arrested for
breaking the city’s ordinance of laying down on the
sidewalk but he was sorely mistaken.
That officer falsely claimed that Spriesterbach
was Thomas Castleberry, who had a warrant out for
his arrest for violating probation in a 2006 drug
case. Spriesterbach and Castleberry had never met,
yet police and every official involved with
Spriesterbach’s wrongful kidnapping claimed he was
Castleberry.
According to the Innocence Project, the
incompetence of the police and hospital officials
reached utterly criminal levels as all they needed
to do to figure out that Spriesterbach was not
Castleberry was to compare fingerprints or
photographs—but none of that was done.
Instead, officials claimed Spriesterbach was
insane for telling the state they had the wrong guy
and he was committed to a state mental facility in
Hawaii.
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“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. “It was
understandable that Mr. Spriestersbach was in an
agitated state when he was being wrongfully
incarcerated for Mr. Castleberry’s crime and despite
his continual denial of being Mr. Castleberry and
providing all of his relevant identification and
places where he was located during Mr. Castleberry’s
court appearances, no one would believe him or take
any meaningful steps to verify his identity and
determine that what Mr. Spriestersbach was telling
the truth—he was not Mr. Castleberry.”
The incompetence along the way was systemic. Even
his public defenders chose to ignore him instead of
simply running his fingerprints or looking at a
photo.
Luckily, after spending nearly three years being
drugged in a cage, Spriesterbach crossed paths with
a competent psychiatrist who finally listened to
him. According to the Innocence Project, all it took
was a simple Google search to verify Spriesterbach’s
identity.
The psychiatrist then called a detective to come
to the hospital and the detective easily verified
Spriesterbach’s fingerprints and photograph to
determine the wrong man had been arrested and
Spriestersbach spent two years and eight months
institutionalized, the petition said. Even more
insidious is the fact that at the time police
arrested Spriesterbach—claiming he was
Castleberry—Castleberry was already in jail, and had
been there since 2016.
Instead of apologizing immensely to the man they
had forcibly drugged and caged for nearly three
years, officials moved secretly to cover up their
incompetence. They held a secret meeting and decided
to dump Spriesterbach out on the street with nothing
to his name, betting on the fact that no one would
believe him.
“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 court document said.
Police, the state public defender’s office, the
state attorney general and the hospital “share in
the blame for this gross miscarriage of justice,”
the petition said.
After the hospital dumped him out on the streets
again, Spriesterbach ended up in a homeless shelter
who contacted his family.
Spriesterbach now lives with his sister in
Vermont and is extremely shaken.
“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,”‘ his sister,
Vedanta Griffith,
told The Associated Press, noting that she had
spent nearly two decades searching for her brother.
“So they used that as saying he was delusional, as
justification for keeping him.”
“And then when light is shown on it, what do they
do? They don’t even put it on the record. They don’t
make it part of the case,” Griffith said. “And then
they don’t come to him and say, `We are so sorry’
or, how about even `Gee, this wasn’t you. You were
right all along.”‘
According to Griffith, Spriestersbach now refuses
to leave his sister’s 10-acre property.
“He’s so afraid that they’re going to take him
again,” she said.
This is not some simple mistake, this is gross
incompetence of a callous system, with everyone
along the way refusing to do their taxpayer-funded
jobs. Instead of simply running a man’s fingerprints
or looking in their system for a photo, they chose
to lock him away and forcibly drug him for years.
This is not some case of a bad apple framing an
innocent man. This was the entire system—that
constantly demands our trust and forces us to obey
it—who couldn’t have cared less about kidnapping,
caging, and drugging an innocent human being before
discarding him like a piece of garbage.
This article was originally featured at
The Free Thought Project and is republished with
permission.
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