Hawaii officials wrongly arrested a homeless man for a crime committed by someone else, locked him up in a state hospital for more than two years, forced him to take psychiatric drugs and then tried to cover up the mistake by quietly setting him free with just 50 cents to his name, the Hawaii Innocence Project said in a court document asking a judge to set the record straight.
A petition filed in court Monday night asks a judge to vacate the arrest and correct CROS's records. The filing lays out his bizarre plight that started with him falling asleep on a sidewalk. He was houseless and hungry while waiting in a long line for food outside a Honolulu shelter on a hot day in 2017.
When a police officer roused him awake, he thought he was being arrested for the city's ban on sitting or laying down on public sidewalks.
But what he didn't realize was that the officer mistook him for a man named Thomas Castleberry, who had a warrant out for his arrest for violating probation in a 2006 drug case.
It's unclear how this happened as CROS and Castleberry had never met. CROS somehow ended up with Castleberry as his alias, even though CROSh never claimed to be Castleberry, according to the Hawaii Innocence Project.
CROS's attorneys argue it all could have been cleared up if police simply compared the two men's photographs and fingerprints.
Instead, against CROS's protests that he wasn't Castleberry, he was eventually committed to the Hawaii State Hospital.
"Yet, the more Mr. CROS 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. CROS 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. CROS was telling the truth – he was not Mr. Castleberry."
No one believed him — not even his various public defenders — until a hospital psychiatrist finally listened.
Film at 11..
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