DARLINGTON — After spending half a decade fighting a felony conviction related to a 2012 hunting season standoff, a Gratiot man is suing two conservation wardens with the state Department of Natural Resources for infringing on his constitutional rights.

Robert J. Stietz, 70, was convicted at a jury trial of recklessly endangering the safety of the wardens by intentionally pointing a firearm at them. He was sentenced in 2014 to one year in a state prison.

He took the case to the Court of Appeals, without success, and then in 2017 to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which concluded his right to present a self-defense argument at trial was erroneously denied. In a 4-2 vote, with one justice absent, the court overturned the appeals opinion upholding his conviction, ordered a new trial for Stietz and restored his record of no prior convictions.

The case came to an end in July back in Lafayette County Circuit Court. As part of a plea deal, Stietz pleaded no contest to an amended misdemeanor charge of resisting or obstructing an officer. The felony was dismissed. Judge Thomas Vale accepted the joint plea agreement and sentenced Stietz to time served.

Now Stietz is taking civil action against the wardens.

He is seeking an unspecified financial judgment for “losses including but not limited to mental and emotional pain and suffering, loss of his capacity to enjoy life’s activities ... severe distress caused by the year of incarceration, loss of wages, salary, social security, legal fees and costs to defend against the criminal action,” as well as “damages to his rifle.”

The lawsuit, filed in November, alleges wardens violated Stietz’s constitutional rights to bear arms and to be secure from unreasonable seizures.

Stietz was looking for trespassers on landlocked acreage he and his wife owned in the Town of Lamont at dusk on Nov. 25, 2012, the final day of the deer gun hunting season that year.

DNR Conservation Wardens Joe Frost and Nick Webster were looking for hunting violators when they saw an empty gun case, buck lure and a tree stand seat on the seat of Stietz’s parked vehicle.

Many of the details of what happened next are in dispute.

The lawsuit alleges Frost and Webster decided to go onto the property and past a gate, despite seeing no violations of any state law or seeing anyone in the vicinity, and “shined a bright flashlight into the face and eyes” of Stietz.

“At no point during this initial meeting in the complete darkness other than the flashlight in the eyes was (Stietz) able to see any identification on the clothing of the defendants to show that they were DNR wardens nor was (he) able to hear or understand any words uttered by the defendants to identify them as DNR wardens,” Stietz’s attorney Stephen Morgan, of Madison law firm Murphy Desmond S.C., wrote in the lawsuit.

Frost asked to see Stietz’s loaded rifle. Stietz, who claimed he still did not know who the men were, refused to hand it over. There was a scuffle over the rifle, and a standoff ensued between all three armed men, leading one of the wardens to call the Lafayette County Sheriff’s Office for help.

Stietz’s lawsuit asserts that the wardens “had no legal reason to demand” that he give them his rifle, nor did they have legal reason to “grab (Stietz) and take or seize the rifle.”

The lawsuit cites a quote from the Supreme Court opinion: “The wardens in this case overlooked Stietz’s right to be secure in his person under the Fourth Amendment by forcefully disarming him and seizing him and his lawfully possessed rifle.”

Furthermore, the justices argued, if the wardens had not “trespassed” or “forcibly wrestled away” Stietz’s rifle, the standoff would not have occurred at all.

The lawsuit claims it was “an illegal, unreasonable and warrantless seizure” and that the wardens’ actions “were intentional, willful, unwarranted, malicious and made in reckless disregard” of Stietz’s civil rights.

Frost and Webster have yet to respond to the lawsuit, and no initial court hearing is yet scheduled. Calls to Frost and Webster were not immediately returned.

In an emotional statement in court, Webster previously said that he relives the incident “over and over” in his mind almost every day and that it has been “hard seeing the toll this has taken on my family and friends.”

“The choices Stietz made that night will undoubtedly affect us all in one way or another for the remainder of our lives,” he said.