When a federal appellate court judge tells you the first rule of holes is to stop digging, you might want to take that advice.

Lawyers John Steele and Paul Hansmeier did not.

Chief Judge Diane Wood of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a tart opinion yesterday concerning the pair, who are fighting a 2013 federal court order to pay $261,000 in sanctions. They are on their fourth appeal.

“When last we considered John Steele and Paul Hansmeier's challenges to contempt sanctions imposed on them, we gave them some friendly advice: stop digging,” she wrote. “Apparently they did not realize that we meant what we said.”

Steele, from Chicago, and Hansmeier, from Minnesota, are the surviving members of the infamous Prenda Law, a now-defunct Chicago firm christened “a porno-trolling collective” by a federal judge in Washington, D.C. (A third lawyer in the firm, Paul Duffy, died in August 2015 and thus goes “beyond our jurisdiction,” Wood wrote.) Prenda used ISP addresses to identify people all over the country who had downloaded pirated pornography from the internet and threatened to sue them for copyright infringement. The lawyers then offered to settle the cases for $4,000, and many agreed, afraid of judgments as high as $150,000 and being named in the public record.

The scheme began to crater in 2012 when a California court sanctioned the attorneys, followed several months later by the U.S. Southern District of Illinois' sanctions. Steele, Hansmeier and Duffy did not pay the sanctions by the appointed deadline and so earned additional penalties of more than $159,000. To avoid them, “they dissembled to the district court and engaged in discovery shenanigans,” Wood wrote. Since then, Steele has paid his part of the extra sanctions, and Hansmeier has filed for bankruptcy.

Neither Steele nor Hansmeier returned messages seeking comment.

Steele's latest challenge sought to overturn the court's sanction for contempt. It was a criminal contempt sanction, not a civil one, he argued, and he did not receive proper due process. Wood agreed with him, overturning the sanction and sending it back to the lower court to do again.

“We make no comment on what type of contempt (the plaintiff) may wish to seek,” she wrote. “We are confident that the district court will take a fresh look at these questions in light of this opinion.”

A betting person would guess the district judge will opt for criminal contempt sanctions, said Mary Patricia Benz, a Chicago attorney who represents lawyers charged by the Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission. The commission regulates lawyers on behalf of the Illinois Supreme Court. In fact, Steele has been charged by the commission with eight counts of fraud, dishonesty and improper use of the courts system by the regulatory commission. If he loses his case, he could be disbarred. Meanwhile, Steele continues to work as an attorney, now suing businesses that violate the Americans With Disabilities Act.