NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — Former Tyco International Ltd. chief executive officer Dennis Kozlowski, now in jail for stealing millions of dollars from the Bermuda-based company, plans to appeal his conviction to the US Supreme Court.

Kozlowski hired New York-based Carter Ledyard & Milburn to represent him in the appeal, Alan Lewis, a partner at the firm, said in an interview yesterday. Lewis plans to file a petition asking the country's highest court to hear the case. The petition is due about April 13, Lewis said.

Kozlowski lost a previous appeal in October, when Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick of the New York State Court of Appeals in Albany upheld his conviction. Ciparick found that a lower judge properly quashed a subpoena for interview notes taken during Tyco's internal investigation.

"Because the subpoena was quashed, my client's right to compulsory process was denied," Lewis said. The Sixth Amendment protects a defendant's right to use court processes to compel disclosure of evidence.

The notes that the defendants sought to subpoena were likely to contain inconsistencies relating to the directors' trial testimony about the bonuses, according to Lewis. Kozlowski and Mark Swartz, Tyco's former chief financial officer, were convicted of stealing money they claimed as bonuses, based in large part on the directors' testimony.

Nathaniel Marmur, a partner at New York-based Stillman, Friedman & Shechtman who represents Swartz, didn't immediately return a call for comment.

Carter Ledyard is a 150-year old Wall Street law firm of about 120 lawyers, according to its website. It doesn't publicly disclose its financials and isn't ranked in the annual survey of US large firms published by The American Lawyer, a trade publication.

Kozlowski and Swartz were convicted in 2005 of securities fraud, grand larceny and falsifying business records. They stole about $137 million from Tyco, owner of ADT, the world's biggest provider of security systems, through unauthorised bonuses and the abuse of company loans, prosecutors said. They have paid $105 million in fines and $134 million in restitution, and are serving prison sentences of 8 ?-to-25-years.

After the state appeals court upheld the conviction, Lewis and Michael Shapiro, also a partner at Carter Ledyard, wrote an article for The New York Law Journal analysing Ciparick's decision.

The decision "has the potential to be a game-changer" for some litigants, they wrote, because it imposes "new and potentially insurmountable hurdles" on parties that seek to obtain non-privileged materials prepared for litigation by another party.

The defendants sought to subpoena notes from interviews with some of Tyco's board members, according to the Law Journal article. The interviews were done by David Boies, who represented Tyco in an internal investigation at a time when Swartz was still employed by Tyco, the lawyers wrote.

Boies is a name partner at New York-based Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP. Boies, Schiller spokeswoman Dawn Schneider declined to comment. Carter Ledyard now has the active role in the case, according to Lewis.

Kozlowski and Swartz are in upstate New York prisons. They may be eligible for work release in August 2010, according to Linda Foglia, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Correctional Services. With good behaviour, they may be eligible for merit release in August 2012, she said. The maximum terms, 25 years, would end in September 2030.