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Claudia Hoerig earns herself another unflattering description: ‘vexatious’
By Ed Runyan
CLEVELAND
In a victim-impact statement Friday in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court, relatives of Karl Hoerig used words such as “evil” and “vindictive” to describe Claudia Hoerig, convicted of killing her husband in 2007 in Newton Falls.
She was sentenced to 28 years to life in prison and now resides in Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville.
Also on Friday, a federal judge gave her another name: “vexatious.” It means annoying, infuriating, harassing.
In a judgment entry, Judge Dan A. Polster ruled against Hoerig’s request to have her murder case dismissed.
The judge called that request, filed Feb. 7, “improper and frivolous” because it did not provide a basis for the request. Instead, it referenced the news media and the corrections officers at the Trumbull County jail.
Her request said she would not be speaking at her sentencing hearing last Friday because she had been misquoted in the past by the news media and the people who transcribed her comments to police in a videotaped interview.
Further, the judge cited Hoerig’s newest and earlier submissions and said they are part of a pattern of improper and frivolous filings.
As a result, the judge said he had deemed Claudia a “vexatious litigator” and was ordering that she no longer be allowed to file any “new motions, objections, notices or any other filings in this case.”
Legaldictionary.net says a vexatious litigator is one who “files multiple lawsuits, without legitimate grounds, with the intention of harassing or quieting another person.” It says they are an “abuse of the legal system.”
Judge Polster ordered that the U.S. District Court’s clerk’s office refrain from filing any document submitted by Hoerig, or anyone on her behalf, and to return those documents.
The lone exception is that she can file an appeal of Judge Polster’s order, just as a federal judge in Akron, John R. Adams, ordered earlier after Hoerig had submitted filings to him.
Judge Andrew Logan, the judge who oversaw Hoerig’s aggravated-murder case in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court, also banned her from submitting such filings with him without consent from her attorneys.
Her filings to Judge Logan produced a written rebuke from the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s office, calling them “rambling, twaddling documents of drivel and bushwa ... filled with vicious ... attacks.” The point of the prosecutor’s filing was to ask Judge Logan to strike the filings from the record, which Judge Logan did.
Hoerig was convicted Jan. 24 of killing her husband, Karl Hoerig, a major in the U.S. Air Force Reserves, in their Newton Falls home and fleeing to her native Brazil, where she remained free nine years until the Brazilian Supreme Court stripped her of her Brazilian citizenship and allowed her to be returned to Ohio to face trial.