By Jared S. Hopkins and Stacy St. Clair/Chicago Tribune

As the criminal investigation involving the Blackhawks’ Patrick Kane stretches into its third week, the superstar winger’s fate ultimately rests in the hands of a longtime prosecutor weighing his own political future.
Erie County District Attorney Frank Sedita III, a member of a powerful western New York political family, must decide in September whether to run for an open seat on the New York Supreme Court, the trial-level court in the state’s judicial system. But his candidacy is so widely expected that the Erie County Bar Association’s judiciary committee already has invited him to appear before its panel for a campaign interview.
It’s enough, lawyers who have watched his career say, to make the famously deliberate Sedita move even more deliberately as he considers the Kane investigation. Over 27 years as a prosecutor, Sedita has built a reputation both for being tough on sex crimes and for avoiding cases that could potentially backfire.
Those two traits could collide in the Kane case, where the authorities are investigating a sexual assault complaint involving the popular Buffalo-born sports figure.
The case already has drawn international media interest and sparked heated, often vicious, debate on social media, though Kane, 26, has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
“He was a very fine trial lawyer, and I think he looks at all of the cases that he has to oversee with a trial lawyer’s eye,” said Frank Clark, Sedita’s predecessor. “He’s very conservative in how he proceeds. He wants to make sure he’s got sufficient evidence not only to proceed but to convict.”
In an interview, Sedita said he has not decided if he will seek the bench. “Even if I had some kind of political ambition or some kind of ambition to run for another office, it has nothing to do with the decisions I make on a day-to-day basis as the elected district attorney of this county,” he said.
Politics have been the Sedita family’s lifeblood for at least three generations and the Seditas are tightly woven into Buffalo’s civic fabric, much the way the Daleys are in Chicago. Sedita’s grandfather, Frank A.
Sedita, served three terms as the city’s mayor, and his late father, Frank Sedita Jr., was a judge for 16 years.
Frank Sedita III, 54, has spent nearly his entire career in the Eric County district attorney’s office, working his way up from misdemeanor prosecutions to chief of the homicide bureau before being elected the county’s chief prosecutor in 2008. A Democrat, he won a second term in 2012 unopposed. His office’s felony conviction rate is 98 percent, he said.
Married with a college-age son, Sedita is regarded as a hardworking, thorough and meticulous trial lawyer who has never rested on his family’s accomplishments. He’s been recognized by attorney groups and serves as board president of a statewide prosecutors’ association. “In the courtroom, he is a really good trial attorney,” said Kevin Spitler, president of the Bar Association of Erie County. “He’s a three-ring-binder kind of guy.”
But with the last name Sedita, he inherently understands the political implications of his decisions and, local attorneys say, he rarely moves forward with cases he could lose. Police, too, are critical of Sedita. Retired Buffalo Detective Mark Lauber, who spent 11 years on the homicide unit with Sedita, said officers are skeptical of him because he doesn’t trust them with difficult cases and seeks indisputable evidence _ or, he added, “eyewitnesses who are priests and nuns.”
“It’s unrealistic,” Lauber said. “His nickname is Slam Dunk Frank.”
Sedita readily acknowledges that he has upset some police officers, but he said that it is because he is unafraid to question police.