The old proverb says that a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client. That might be doubly true for a man who has pretended to be a lawyer.

At the very least, Howard O. Kieffer has caused himself a fair share of grief, as well as exasperating judges who have heard his cases and appeals over the past eight years.

During Kieffer’s odyssey of appeals, prison and supervised release, his restitution at one point was mistakenly omitted — saving him $120,000 — and his prison sentence was essentially halved. Although he doesn’t have to repay the restitution, his prison time was raised again after he appealed and the error was discovered. When he went on supervised release, Kieffer flouted rules and kept appealing. Now he faces more prison time.

“This case has gone on far too long. Today, we attempt to end it,” Circuit Judge Gregory Phillips wrote in obvious frustration in a July 27 ruling, while noting that during Kieffer’s appeals “the wheels began to come off.”

But eight months later the case is still going strong, foretelling unremitting court battles by the convict who knows just enough about the law to make him dangerous — even to himself.

In one of the latest appellate rounds, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the “sixth amended judgment” for Kieffer and remanded his case to a lower court to “reinstate” the fifth amended judgment.

Kieffer’s judicial antics were already legendary after he bilked federal defendants across the country out of thousands of dollars. In 2009, a judge in the U.S. District Court in Bismarck, N.D., sentenced Kieffer to 51 months in federal prison and ordered him to pay $152,750 in restitution after he forged documents to become a registered attorney in North Dakota.

Former Denver Post reporter Felisa Cardona wrote that Kieffer represented at least 16 clients in 10 federal jurisdictions around the U.S., mostly on post-conviction motions, all while not having a law degree. Instead of a law diploma, he had a rap sheet. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, Kieffer spent four years in federal prison for filing false tax returns, records show. His rap sheet dating back to 1976 also included convictions for forgery, grand theft, possession of stolen mail, receiving stolen property, false claims against the U.S. and mail fraud, court records indicate.

Kieffer had represented Gwen Bergman, of Pitkin County, during her May 2008 murder-for-hire case in U.S. District Court in Denver, even though he was not a licensed attorney. Her family paid him $65,000 in legal fees. He claimed he graduated from the Antioch School of Law in Washington, D.C., and that he had a firm, Federal Defense Associates, with offices in Santa Ana, Calif., and Duluth, Minn.

In July 2010, a jury in Denver U.S. District Court found Kieffer guilty of wire fraud, making false statements and contempt of court in connection to the Bergman case. Judge Christine Arguello sentenced Kieffer to pay $120,000 in restitution and to serve 57 months in prison, and it was to be served only after he completed his North Dakota term, a total of about nine years.

Meantime, Bergman won the right to have a second trial, but not until she had already been released on parole. A federal prosecutor filed new charges against her, but a federal judge dismissed those charges after she announced she would represent herself.

Kieffer, the jailhouse lawyer extraordinaire, was never content with any sentence against him.

Kieffer filed an appeal of his first judgment, but when Judge Arguello issued a second amended judgment, he filed a second appeal asking the judge to vacate the second judgment. He’d take the first. The 10th Circuit denied the second appeal but remanded the case back to Arguello to make some changes. In March 2014, Arguello vacated the second judgment and issued a third judgment against Kieffer. The following month, Arguello issued a fourth judgment to “pre-emptively” correct another possible error.

Kieffer appealed again. The 10th Circuit vacated the first, third and fourth amended judgments and remanded. In February 2015, the court issued a fifth amended judgment, but this time, the restitution had been omitted. Kieffer appealed on a matter unrelated to restitution. The 10th Circuit took up the case again and affirmed the fifth judgment.

“The case, then, appeared to be at an end. But it was not to be,” appeals Judge Phillips wrote. The court issued a sixth amended judgment because of a “clerical error,” which was the omission of restitution.

“Kieffer appealed, and so here we are again,” Phillips wrote.

“Allowing the district court to further amend the judgment in this case would contribute to the gradual undermining of public confidence in the judiciary,” Kieffer had argued in his pro se appeal.

The 10th Circuit agreed in part with Kieffer, determining that Arguello’s judgment reinstating restitution went too far by going beyond correcting a simple clerical error, which is permissible.

But the appeals court also noticed a similar key error that didn’t favor Kieffer. In the end, he stayed in prison about two years longer than if he hadn’t appealed.

On Dec. 30, 2016, Kieffer was released to parole, which is called “supervised release” in the federal system. His federal probation officer said Kieffer’s time on the outside in Denver could be characterized as involving lies, deception, fraud and more lies and could get him an additional three years in prison, according to a warrant filed on March 5.

“There is evidence to suggest that the defendant has continued to represent himself as a lawyer, or a former lawyer, both of which are false, and this continued behavior not only undermines our judicial process … but poses a risk … to the community,” probation officer Jordan Buescher said in the arrest affidavit.

Kieffer, who is in custody now in Colorado, faces a sentence of up to three years in prison for his violations. In an understatement, Buescher described Kieffer as being less than cooperative.

“The issue here is that this is believed to be only a portion of the deviant, deceptive and non-compliant behaviors that he has exhibited since his supervision began,” Buescher wrote.