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.
