A federal judge in Manhattan declined on Friday to order the release of Lynne F. Stewart, an outspoken former defense lawyer who is dying from cancer in a federal prison in Texas.
The judge, John G. Koeltl of United States District Court, said he could not order such a release under a federal Bureau of Prisons program for terminally ill inmates without the bureau’s first making a motion seeking such action. But the judge suggested that he would look favorably upon such a request if it were presented by the bureau.
“The court would give prompt and sympathetic consideration to any motion for compassionate release filed by the B.O.P, but it is for the B.O.P. to make that motion in the first instance,” he wrote.
Ms. Stewart, 73, defended Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric convicted in 1995 of conspiring to blow up the United Nations and other city landmarks. She was later convicted of smuggling messages from the imprisoned sheik to his violent followers in Egypt, and in 2010, Judge Koeltl sentenced her to 10 years in prison.
Ms. Stewart, who was found to have breast cancer in 2005, is serving her sentence in a prison hospital at the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, where doctors last year determined that her cancer had spread to her lungs, lymph system and bones, court papers show.
In April, she asked the Bureau of Prisons for a compassionate release, a request that the prison warden recommended be approved. In June, the bureau’s director rejected the request, leading Ms. Stewart’s lawyer, Jill R. Shellow, to ask the judge to vacate her sentence.
In denying the request, Judge Koeltl rejected the argument that keeping Ms. Stewart in prison, given her serious illness, violated the ban on cruel and unusual punishment. “There is no right that requires the release from prison of terminally ill inmates,” he wrote.
Ms. Stewart has since asked the bureau to reconsider its decision. Ms. Shellow said: “While we are disappointed, this is hardly the end of this fight. Lynne is going to continue to actively pursue a compassionate release through the B.O.P., and we expect to be back in court, and hope it will be sooner rather than later.”
The Bureau of Prisons declined to comment, as did the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan.