After a two-month hiatus from jail, a former state senator, Guy Velella, could be back in a cell on Rikers Island today.

The longtime Bronx power broker, who was indicted on bribery charges in 2002 and pleaded guilty to conspiracy in May, was ordered Friday to surrender to authorities at Manhattan Criminal Court by 5 p.m. today.

His lawyer, Charles Stillman, has vowed to fight Velella’s return to prison and is expected to seek a temporary stay this morning. If granted, that would keep his client free on probation while the legal challenge is pending.

Velella and two of his co-defendants, Hector Del Toro and Manuel Gonzalez, were freed in September by the city’s Local Conditional Release Commission after serving three months of their one-year sentences. The decision ignited intense controversy and catapulted the virtually unknown commission into the spotlight, where it remains.

Mayor Bloomberg won the resignations of all five members of the commission and reappointed new members. Last week the newly reconstituted board voted to invalidate the releases of Velella, Del Toro, Gonzalez, and the other two Rikers inmates whose applications for release were granted this year, and ordered them to surrender to the city Department of Correction.

Though Mr. Bloomberg never publicly took a position on whether to return Velella to Rikers and tried to distance himself from the commission, he said repeatedly that the former state legislator and his co-defendants should not have been released.

The city’s Department of Investigations and Law Department also deemed the decision to free the men invalid, saying that the necessary majority of commission members was not present when the votes were taken and that the panel violated regulations in making its decisions.

Further complicating the controversy, Mr. Stillman announced that Velella was diagnosed last week with prostate cancer.

The lawyer issued a statement Friday, saying that Velella had done nothing wrong in seeking his freedom and that the commission’s reversing of its decisions was “unjust and legally wrong” and beyond the panel’s authority.

The five inmates granted early release this year were among 7,000 who applied.