More than four years after he got a 20-year maximum prison sentence for fraud, a former co-owner of the New York Islanders is trying to get a break by claiming his previous lawyer should have challenged the judge who jailed him based on mental issues from the aftereffects of her stroke.
Lawyers for Stephen Walsh, 74, formerly of Sands Point, an Islanders co-owner from 1991 to 2000, said in a new filing that the late Manhattan U.S. District Judge Miriam Cedarbaum was out for eight months before his 2014 sentencing. Walsh's lawyers believed Cedarbaum was “cognitively impaired” but sat on their hands, according to the filing.