That's the State of Hawaii's response to the homeless man it wrongfully arrested and pumped full of drugs four years ago. That, along with cover their tracks and hide from sunshine laws.
Joshua Spriestersbach fell asleep on a sidewalk outside the Safe Haven homeless shelter in Chinatown on May 11, 2017 while waiting for a free meal.
When he woke, a Honolulu police officer arrested him for the crimes of another man — Thomas Castleberry — who was wanted for a probation violation related to a series of drug charges in 2006.
The mix-up led to Spriestersbach spending more than two years inside a state-run mental institution where he was heavily medicated and repeatedly told he was someone he was not despite his repeated protestations.
In January 2020, when the mistake was discovered, he was given 50 cents and released back onto the street outside the shelter where he was arrested in the first place.
The whole ordeal happened almost entirely out of public view — that is, until the Hawaii Innocence Project last week filed a petition in state court to clear Spriestersbach’s name and make sure he’s never arrested again for the crimes of Thomas R. Castleberry, a man who’s been incarcerated in Alaska since at least 2016.
Spriestersbach’s story of mistaken identity has since garnered national attention, from the Associated Press to the New York Times, yet officials in Hawaii have mostly kept quiet about a key question still on many people’s minds — how could this happen?
“We’re doing this to exonerate our client, but also to expose the system and its failures,” said Kenneth Lawson, a co-director of the Hawaii Innocence Project. “Mr. Spriestersbach was telling everyone who he was, that he wasn’t Thomas Castleberry, yet nobody was listening. And nobody was listening because nobody cared about a mentally ill man who was houseless.”
Lawson and the Innocence Project have questioned whether officials, from HPD to the public defender to the Hawaii attorney general to the judiciary itself, have tried to hide what happened to Spriestersbach in an attempt to escape public embarrassment and legal accountability.
His case, the petition states, represents a “miscarriage of justice” of the greatest proportions, one that could have been solved in just a few minutes by comparing Spriestersbach’s photo and fingerprints to those of Castleberry.
Instead of trying to address what went wrong, the petition states that those who were culpable “attempted to sweep their mistakes under the rug.”
For instance, the petition highlights court records that show the judge in the case held a closed-door meeting with the lawyers involved, including from the Hawaii Attorney General’s Office, shortly after Spriestersbach was released. Yet few details have come out about what was actually discussed.
The only note in the record says Judge Shirley Kawamura told those at the meeting to “inform their administrators of the situation.”
Kakistocracies everywhere. And it doesn't matter whose lives are ruined, so long as the made men are unhindered in going about their merry ways.
Unless there's an incredible hoax here:
ReplyDelete1. The police never compared his fingerprints to those on file for the other man, in spite of his protests.
2. His public defender never insisted his identity be verified in spite of his protests.
3. The judge at his hearings never insisted his identity be verified in spite of his protests.
4. One person on the staff of the state asylum where he was billeted was curious enough to make the inquiries - after he'd been there for about two years.
You ever hear about how difficult it is to get someone committed? Ha ha.
If we lived in a sane world, there would be an antheap of people facing civil liability here (especially his useless public defenders). Fat chance any of them will suffer anything.
Just want to emphasize the local sheriff's department went through all the rigamarole to arrange for his transfer to the state asylum and no one ever bothered to check their bloody fingerprint databases. You got to figure he gave them the names of his relatives. If they were out of state, it wouldn't necessarily be a cinch to find them, but there are tools you can use and you get lucky a lot with them.
ReplyDeleteThe part that really grinds me is the transcript-free court discussion. This happens far too often--I've been on the receiving end at the federal level. That's bad enough in a civil proceeding. It is utterly unconscionable in a criminal matter.
ReplyDeleteHawaii's legal system has deteriorated much since I graduated high school in the last millennium from there.
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