The man who was labeled as a “fantasy” was committed to a mental hospital for refusing to admit that he was someone else; Big payout wins

A man in the US spent two years in a psychiatric hospital after being mistaken for someone else. Joshua Spersterbach, 55, was arrested by police in 2017 after being arrested off the street at a Hawaii state psychiatric hospital for the crime of a man named Thomas Castleberry. Spresterbach filed a lawsuit for wrongful detention in 2021. According to court documents cited in the lawsuit, Castleberry had been in prison in Alaska since 2016. It also says that police had misidentified him twice before, but did not correct the records, and was finally caught in 2017. He is now set to receive a $975,000 payment from the City and County of Honolulu. The state may offer him a $200,000 settlement to settle legal claims against the Hawaii Public Defender’s Office. In the lawsuit, Spersterbach alleges false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, abuse of process and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The first time police mistook him for Thomas Castleberry was in 2011. He was sleeping at Kawanankwa Middle School in Punchbowl when an officer woke him up and asked his name. He only gave his grandfather’s last name: Castleberry. The officer found a 2009 warrant for Thomas Castleberry and arrested him, despite him telling the officer he was not Thomas Castleberry. He failed to appear for a court date, and the bench warrant was later revoked. Then, in 2015, an HPD officer ran into Spersterbach in a park where he was sleeping. He gave his name, and the officer discovered that Thomas Castleberry was listed as an alias and that there was an arrest warrant in his name. However, this time they took Spersterbach’s fingerprints, which confirmed that he was not Castleberry. But the official records in this department are not renewed.

He claimed in the lawsuit that despite having his fingerprints and photographs with the authorities, they did not use the information. He was arrested in 2017 while waiting for food outside Safe Haven in Chinatown. He fell asleep and was arrested. At the time, he thought it was for restrictions related to sitting or lying down on public streets in Honolulu. Spersterbach spent four months at the Oahu Community Correctional Center and was later transferred to Hawaii State Hospital, where he spent two years. There, he was forced to take psychiatric medication, according to files from the Hawaii Innocence Project. He was released on January 17, 2020.

He says in his complaint that although he presented his identity, the authorities did not believe him. Instead, they said he was “sad and incompetent because he refused to admit that he was Thomas R. Castleberry.”