Lawyer: Ex-Mass. House Speaker suffers from cancer

In a motion filed Tuesday with the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Boston attorney Thomas Kiley said DiMasi was told in January that lumps he found on his neck were potentially cancerous.

Kiley said that before further testing could be done, DiMasi was taken from the federal prison in Lexington, Ky., through various other detention facilities, to the Wyatt detention facility in Central Falls, R.I., for his appearance before a grand jury in Massachusetts investigating patronage in the state court system.

Kiley said DiMasi, 66, repeatedly asked for medical treatment and testing, but he was not examined again until April.

"At each detention facility Mr. DiMasi passed through, he requested medical treatment and asked that the tests that were supposed to have been done in Kentucky be performed," Kiley said in the motion. "He received no such treatment or testing."

In April, after DiMasi returned to Kentucky, doctors found a lesion on his tongue, and they told him they suspected the cancer was spreading because it was affecting his lymph nodes. Further testing in May showed that he had squamous cell cancer that had spread, Kiley said in the motion.

DiMasi was convicted last year of steering state contracts to a software firm in exchange for payments of $65,000. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.

In his motion, Kiley asked that he be given additional time to file his first appeal brief, citing the time spent on trying to get DiMasi additional testing and the time he will now need to receive treatment.