Officials Mistakenly Locked This Man In A Psych Ward, Then Argued He Was Not Sane Enough To Sue

Joshua Spriestersbach was held in the state psychiatric hospital for more than two years after authorities mistook him for someone named Thomas Castleberry and refused to listen to him when he claimed there had been a mix-up. 

The police officers who arrested him, the public defenders who represented him in court and the psychiatrists who treated him at the state hospital chalked up his claims to mental illness — until they eventually discovered their mistake and quietly released him. 

After Spriestersbach sued the state for damages in 2021, officials questioned his sanity once again and even challenged his mental fitness to bring a lawsuit at all. 

Lawyers for the state and other defendants declined to comment. Spriestersbach’s Ohio-based attorney, Alphonse Gerhardstein, declined an interview, except to say that Spriestersbach, who now lives with his sister in Vermont, is “eager for this litigation to conclude as soon as possible.”

Hawaii forensic psychiatrist Sheila Wendler, who is not involved in this case but has years of experience conducting competency evaluations in legal proceedings, said Spriestersbach’s competency shouldn’t be at issue in this lawsuit. His mental illness isn’t central to the allegations, she said — the state’s duty to properly identify him is.

“Let’s say he’s not competent,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter, because both the police and the hospital had a duty to verify who he was. Both neglected their duty and that caused him damage.”

Competency In Court

Spriestersbach’s lawsuit seeks damages for his “outrageous arrest and forced medical treatment” for 32 months after he was arrested outside of a Chinatown homeless shelter in 2017 on a bench warrant for Thomas Castleberry. (The real Castleberry was incarcerated in Alaska at that time.)

Spriestersbach, who has schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, underwent five separate mental fitness evaluations after his arrest. Each time, the court deemed him “unfit to proceed” and re-committed him to the Hawaii State Hospital. 

Even though Spriestersbach repeatedly told the various public defenders who represented him over the course of his case that he was not Thomas Castleberry and could prove it with a birth certificate, they never tried to verify his identity, his complaint says. 

The state quietly released him from the hospital in January 2020 after staff psychiatrist Allison Garrett, also named as a defendant in the lawsuit, told the court that he had been hospitalized in Hilo at the same time Castleberry was allegedly committing crimes on Oahu. 

After Spriestersbach filed his civil rights lawsuit on Nov. 21, 2021, the state brought his mental health into question again. 

In a motion to compel a psychiatric evaluation, the Office of the Public Defender, also named as a defendant in the lawsuit, wrote that Spriestersbach’s “representations of his own disability” suggested that he was “not competent to make legal decisions or sign binding documents, answer questions or take positions in a manner that is not altered, affected or controlled by symptoms.” 

They also wrote that his record showed his communication was “severely unpredictable and unreliable” and that “there is a question as to his ability to perceive reality from hallucination.” 

Though Gerhardstein, Spriestersbach’s lawyer, disagreed with the state’s claims, he filed a motion to substitute a guardian who could act on his behalf in the civil proceedings. A motion to appoint the guardian says that he was appointed voluntarily and his guardianship would be supervised by the county probate court of Rutland, Vermont, where Spriestersbach lives.

State law says that guardians can be appointed in civil proceedings to act on the behalf of infants or people deemed incompetent.

Some of the defendants in Spriestersbach’s lawsuit then raised concerns about whether he was even “competent to consent to a voluntary guardianship,” according to minutes from an Oct. 7, 2022, meeting. 

Lawyers for both sides went back and forth about ordering a court-appointed psychiatric evaluation to determine whether he was fit to proceed with the lawsuit himself or to appoint someone else to act on his behalf.

On June 7, a judge ordered an evaluation by Boston-based forensic psychiatrist Renee Sorrentino. The judge wrote that his competency was sufficiently called into question to merit an evaluation. The judge cited Spriestersbach’s own assertions about his mental condition, his lawyers’ request that he be given special accommodations for a deposition and the fact that he was found incompetent to continue with his criminal proceedings on multiple occasions between 2018 and 2019.

The judge also wrote that the doubt about his mental competency “further brings to question whether Plaintiff even had the ability to consent to his 40-page complaint in the first place.”

Sorrentino later conducted her evaluation, and her findings were submitted to the court under seal on Sept. 27. Although the findings aren’t publicly available, a guardian was never appointed to substitute for Spriestersbach, and the proceedings continued.

“Parties agree no further action required concerning (Spriestersbach’s) competency at this time,” minutes from a Sept. 27 telephone conference say. 

Psych Evaluations

But that wasn’t the last psychiatric evaluation Spriestersbach would be asked to undergo over the course of his lawsuit.

On March 18, Garrett’s attorney, Lois Yamaguchi, requested a four- to six-hour independent medical examination of Spriestersbach by the defense’s own psychiatric expert, Neil Kaye. 

In an email included in court documents, Gerhdstein demanded to know why, considering that Spriesterbach had been under the state’s supervision.

“Please tell me more about the basis for your request and why it is needed given your client’s treatment of Mr. Spriestersbach for so long,” he wrote.

Yamaguchi replied the defense has a right to its own examination. 

“As a civil rights advocate, surely you cannot be suggesting that Dr. Garrett is not entitled to have her own forensic expert perform a forensic examination, which would severely restrict her ability to defend against the claims which have been brought against her in this case,” she wrote. 

After some back and forth, the parties agreed — Spriestersbach would undergo an examination with Kaye at a “neutral location” in Rutland, Vermont on April 29. The examination would be limited to six hours. No one, including his lawyer, a guardian or his doctor, would be allowed to be present in the exam room.

Wendler said its standard procedure for the defense to request its own psychiatric evaluation, especially since in this case Spriestersbach is claiming that he suffered psychological damage due to the state’s actions.

“If the claimant says he suffered an injury, whoever is being sued can ask for their own psychiatric evaluation,” she said.

A trial is scheduled for Aug. 26.

Last week, Jennifer Brown of the Hawaii Innocence Project filed a separate lawsuit on Spriestersbach’s behalf in Circuit Court. The lawsuit names his former public defenders as defendants and alleges they failed to diligently represent him and allowed him to be misidentified.

Mental Illness In The Court System

Spriestersbach’s saga has highlighted the challenges those living with homelessness and mental illness face when dealing with the criminal justice system, said Chad Koyanagi, a psychiatrist with the state Department of Health who works with homeless populations.

“A lot of chronically homeless folks have mental illness and are already compromised because of that and other issues that combine to make their lives extremely challenging and make it very hard for them to care for themselves and navigate the complex world around them,” he said. “It’s not terribly surprising that every now and then, you can have a series of unfortunate circumstances that lead to a magnified outcome.”

Spriestersbach’s woes began because of misidentification, which his lawyers blame on a series of mistakes by government agencies. One was the Honolulu Police Department’s failure to update an online database that listed some of Spriestersbach’s identifying information under the name “Thomas Castleberry.”

Koyanagi said part of the problem is that it can be extremely difficult for homeless people to maintain valid identification for a variety of reasons, including mental illness, ID cards getting lost or stolen and difficulty tracking down original documents such as birth certificates.

“I think nationwide we need more and more effective outreach services to the homeless,” he said.

Another issue is that people with mental illness going through the criminal justice system often aren’t taken as seriously as those without mental illness, Wendler said.

Over the course of Spriestersbach’s case, she said, many people tasked with representing him or taking care of him disregarded what he said or thought they knew better than him. But mental illness should never be a reason for a person to be treated unfairly or deprived of their rights, she said.

“When they have active symptoms, they may need medication, they may need to be hospitalized, they may be confused, but besides that, having a mental illness is not a reason to be treated differently than people that don’t have mental illnesses,” she said. “Mental illness can be treated, symptoms can be treated … they should not be discriminated because of a mental illness.”