Pledge gets woman out of jail

Karen Abbott, Rocky Mountain News

Published January 5, 2006 at midnight

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Former Steamboat Springs resident Kay Sieverding, who has been in jail since September, was released Wednesday after she agreed to dismiss her numerous federal lawsuits.

"If I dismiss them, will you let me out of jail today?" Sieverding, 50, now of Wisconsin, asked Colorado U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham in his courtroom Wednesday morning.

"Yes," said Nottingham, who jailed Sieverding for refusing to stop filing lawsuits, without an attorney, saying the lawsuits were "frivolous," "abusive" and "gibberish."

"All right," said Sieverding. "I'll do it."

The cases stem from a dispute with neighbors in Steamboat Springs. Sieverding has filed lawsuits against not only her former neighbors but also Steamboat Springs officials, the local newspaper, several individual lawyers and the entire Colorado and American Bar Associations, among others. She has filed the lawsuits in Colorado U.S. District Court, and also in federal courts in Illinois, Minnesota, Kansas and the District of Columbia.

Sieverding's husband, David, said afterward that he had been trying to persuade his wife to drop the lawsuits but was surprised when she did.

"I had no clue," he said.

David Sieverding was in the courtroom with his own lawyer, Mike O'Malley, who told the judge he had just been hired to get David Sieverding "out of this mess."

David Sieverding was a plaintiff, along with his wife, in many of her lawsuits. He earlier had promised Nottingham that he would withdraw from them, and Wednesday's hearing was scheduled partly to determine if he had. O'Malley said he had, but that all the paperwork had not yet reached the courts involved.

David Sieverding left the courthouse quickly after the hearing to get clothes for his wife, who had to turn in her orange jail scrubs before deputy U.S. marshals could let her go.

But when she walked out of the courthouse an hour later in a new gray and white sweatsuit, Kay Sieverding was unrepentant.

"I believe that I was robbed of justice," she said, as her husband implored her, "Please, don't do this."

"And I think that it was illegal collusion," Kay Sieverding continued.

She said she will complain to "the attorney general, the FBI, Congress and the White House."

She said she agreed to dismiss her lawsuits only under duress.

"I was threatened with imprisonment, and so was my husband," she said. "I believe that I was a victim of conspiracy to deprive rights, which is a federal crime."

In Nottingham's courtroom earlier Wednesday, she had raised her hand and meekly asked the judge to explain why he found her lawsuits frivolous.

"Ms. Sieverding, once you lose in court you can't go back and re-litigate the same case over and over," Nottingham told her in an icy voice. "You lost in the state court in Steamboat Springs."

When she filed new lawsuits over the same issues in federal court, a federal magistrate judge issued a 60-page recommendation explaining why she couldn't do that, and Nottingham adopted that recommendation and threw out her suit. Kay Sieverding appealed that ruling to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld Nottingham's decision.

"You lost again," Nottingham said.

"Now, it may be hard for you to accept the fact that you've lost at every level that you have and you cannot go back and do it over and over again as you are trying to do," he said.

"You are inflicting damage, economic damage, on people that shouldn't have that damage inflicted on them. They have won. They have prevailed."

"The issue is not your access to the court. There is no doubt that a citizen has the right to petition the courts . . . but that right is limited," Nottingham said. "You cannot file frivolous lawsuits."

"Now sit down," the judge barked.

The judge said he will issue an additional order prohibiting Kay Sieverding from filing any more lawsuits, anywhere in the United States, without an attorney or his permission.

abbottk@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5188

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