The chairman of the Local Conditional Release Commission, Raul Russi, resigned yesterday afternoon after meeting with Mayor Bloomberg. Mr. Russi had met with the mayor to explain why he supported the early release of a former legislator, Guy Velella, who was sentenced in June to a year in jail after a guilty plea to a felony in a bribery scandal.

Velella, 60, who was a Republican state senator from the Bronx, was freed from Rikers Island jail after serving a little more than three months of his sentence. The Local Conditional Release Commission approved his early release. Critics saw the release as cronyism for a political heavyweight. Mr. Bloomberg immediately denounced the release and called for an investigation. He has since been signaling that Mr. Russi’s days at the com mission were numbered.

“In light of the Commission’s decision to grant the early release of former State Senator Guy Velella, Chairman Russi has decided that it was in the best interests of the City of New York to have new leadership at the Commission,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a written statement released at City Hall.

The mayor said that although the commissioner of the Department of Investigation, Rose Gill Hearn, had not yet completed her investigation into the matter, there was no evidence to date that showed illegal conduct affected the commission’s decision. Mr. Bloomberg had also asked the commissioner to make sure that no one in the Bloomberg administration had been involved, even tangentially, in the Velella decision.

Mr. Bloomberg tapped a tenured professor of law at Fordham Law School to step into the vacant spot. Daniel Richman will become the new chairman of the Local Conditional Release Commission effective immediately, the mayor said.

Mr. Richman has a distinguished background. He worked as a federal prosecutor in New York from 1987 to 1992 and worked as an associate in private practice at the firm Belknap, Webb & Tyler. He was a clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall at the Supreme Court as well as for Judge Wilfred Feinberg in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He has a law degree from Yale University, did graduate work at Oxford University in England, and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University.

While Mr. Bloomberg appointed a new commission chairman, he said the release commission has “outlived its useful purpose” and he “would support legislation abolishing it.”