HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) – A lawyer for a Connecticut man who spent 48 years on the lam after escaping from prison says his client is in poor health and he will ask Georgia officials to commute his 17-year robbery sentence.

Seventy-one-year-old Robert Stackowitz was arrested Monday at his home in rural Sherman after his Social Security application turned up a fugitive warrant. He escaped in 1968 from a prison work camp in Carrolton, Georgia. He’s now detained on $75,000 bail.

Stackowitz’s lawyer, Norman Pattis, told The Associated Press on Friday that his client suffers from heart failure, bladder cancer and other ailments and that sending him back to Georgia to serve the remainder of his sentence would amount to a death sentence.

Pattis plans to ask Georgia officials to commute Stackowitz’s sentence.