Ms. Warren will leave office early as part of a plea deal on campaign finance violations. The deal also resolves gun charges against her.
Lovely Warren, the embattled Democratic mayor of Rochester, N.Y., agreed to resign on Monday as part of a plea deal on several state criminal charges, capping a swift and staggering fall for a politician once considered a rising star in the state Democratic Party.
The plea deal, in Monroe County court, resolves two separate state cases against Ms. Warren: one arising from campaign finance violations and another that included gun and child-endangerment charges that Ms. Warren and her estranged husband faced.
Ms. Warren’s resignation is effective Dec. 1, just a month before she would have left office, having lost a June primary for a third term to Malik Evans, a city councilman.
Last October, Ms. Warren was indicted by a grand jury in Monroe County on two campaign finance charges related to her 2017 re-election campaign, involving her official campaign fund and a political action committee.
Those charges came just a month after Ms. Warren’s administration had been engulfed in a scandal involving accusations of a cover-up in the death in March 2020 of Daniel Prude, a Black man, after the Rochester police pinned him to the ground and put a hood over his head while taking him into custody.
In July, Ms. Warren and her husband, Timothy Granison, were indicted on gun and child-endangerment charges, after police found weapons in a May raid of the home they shared, despite being estranged. Both pleaded not guilty.
Mr. Granison had previously been charged in state and federal court as part of what prosecutors called a drug-trafficking ring. His charges weren’t resolved by Ms. Warren’s plea, his lawyer said Monday.
In a news conference after her husband’s May arrest, Ms. Warren said she was the victim of a conspiracy, engineered in part by the county prosecutor, to discredit her on the eve of the Democratic primary. “People will try anything to break me,” she said.
Ms. Warren’s resignation adds to a period of turmoil in Rochester, a city of some 200,000 people on the shores of Lake Ontario that suffered a steep toll from the coronavirus and was shaken by the fallout from the death of Mr. Prude, including heated demonstrations and the firing of the city’s police chief.
A lawyer and onetime president of the City Council, Ms. Warren was the city’s first female mayor and the youngest in the modern era. She was first elected in 2013 after scoring a stunning upset against a Democratic incumbent, Thomas S. Richards, in both a September primary and a general election two months later. (Mr. Richards ran on two third-party lines.)
She was also the city’s second Black mayor and spoke passionately in her 2014 inaugural address about the city’s future, devoting her speech to promises to her young daughter.
“I know this isn’t going to be easy,” she said. “But I’m going to fight for changes and outcomes with the fierceness of a parent defending their child. Because I am defending you, and all of Rochester’s children.”
She was handily re-elected in 2017, but the criminal charges against her arose from allegations raised at the time by her challengers about evasion of donor limits. Those complaints led to an investigation by the state Board of Elections.
Ms. Warren’s trial on the campaign finance charges was set to begin on Monday. Carrie Cohen, her lawyer, said that the mayor’s plea — to a misdemeanor, rather than the initial felony charges she had faced — was in line with her previous admission that payments to her political action committee “were not categorized correctly.”
“There never was any allegation of theft of any campaign or other funds by the mayor, or anybody else involved in the campaign,” said Ms. Cohen, adding that the plea resolved all the pending state criminal charges without admission of any fraud or dishonesty.
Calli Marianetti, a spokeswoman for Sandra Doorley, the Monroe County district attorney, said that as part of a plea deal with Ms. Warren, the gun and child endangerment charges would no longer be pursued.
In a statement, Ms. Doorley said that the resolution of the charges facing Ms. Warren — and those facing two fellow defendants, her campaign treasurer and Rochester’s finance director — was “fair and just based on the nature of their crimes.”
“This is an important step in our larger efforts in promoting ethical elections in our state,” said Ms. Doorley, a Republican.
It was the Daniel Prude case that came to define much of Ms. Warren’s second term. In March 2020, Mr. Prude, visiting Rochester from Chicago, ran out of his brother’s home in an agitated state. After his brother called 911, police responded and handcuffed Mr. Prude. When he began spitting, they covered his head with a hood and later pinned him on the ground, face down.
Mr. Prude stopped breathing and was resuscitated, but died a week later at a hospital. An internal investigation by police quickly cleared the officers involved, despite a medical examiner’s finding that Mr. Prude’s death was a homicide caused by “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.”
Months later, the public release of a video of the encounter sparked outrage in the wake of a national reckoning over police brutality. Ms. Warren soon announced the firing of the police chief and suspension of other city officials, but questions about her response — and allegations of a cover-up — continued to dog her.
Mr. Evans, the Democratic nominee and Ms. Warren’s presumptive successor, said Monday that he expected to continue to work with the administration until Ms. Warren stepped down.
“We have to stay focused on making sure the city of Rochester continues to move forward,” Mr. Evans said.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
