Trying to save a client’s life at NUMC

Though he stopped short of calling it precedent-setting, attorney Leonard Isaacs, a Woodmere resident with a Valley Stream practice, said that the decision by District Court Judge Francis Ricigliano to vacate Diane McCloud’s petit larceny sentence to allow her to seek a heart transplant is certainly uncommon.

“I don’t know if I can recall a case like this in almost 34 years,” said Isaacs, a criminal defense and personal injury litigator. “I have never seen a case like this, and no one I know has handled a case like this.”

Isaacs, 59, initially represented McCloud, 47, of Hempstead, in September, when she was given a reduced sentence of 15 months in jail for two Class A misdemeanor petit larceny charges that were originally Class E felonies. McCloud had violated her parole from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility by shoplifting approximately $3,800 of merchandise from a Target store in Westbury in 2009 and last year.

After receiving a note from McCloud’s doctor that her heart condition had worsened and she had less than six months to live if she did not receive a new heart, Isaacs went back to court to argue for her release from the Nassau County Correctional Center in East Meadow. She was not eligible for parole until August.

“I argued a motion to vacate her judgment in the interests of justice,” Isaacs said. “She was released on her own recognizance and the conditions are [that] she go for the requisite testing.”

In his decision, Ricigliano noted that McCloud’s guilty plea would stand, but he vacated her current sentence and will resentence her after her medical issues are resolved. Isaacs said that the judge and the Nassau County district attorney’s office came together “to save this woman’s life.” The D.A.’s office would not comment on the case.

McCloud could be one of the nearly 1,500 cardiac transplants that are done each year in the U.S., according to Dr. Sanjay Doddamani, chief of cardiology at Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow. McCloud is one of the first patients to be helped by the hospital’s newly established heart failure center, headed by Debra Ahearn, a nurse who worked with renowned cardiologist Dr. Milton Packer for 18 years.