DA hopefuls Sedita, LaVallee, Case start their race to succeed Clark
The three-candidate race for Erie County district attorney kicked off Thursday with each of them vowing to make the county’s chief law enforcement agency one of the best — if not the best — in the state.
Deputy District Attorney Frank A. Sedita III, 46, the acknowledged front-runner to succeed retiring Frank J. Clark, vowed to eliminate highly paid purely “administrative” posts that have developed in the office since the 1950s.
Diane M. LaVallee, 49, a state and local prosecutor for 25 years and the first woman to seek the post, said she was pleased that the county Republican leadership crossed party lines to endorse her, a Democrat.
Kenneth F. Case, 46, once a top homicide prosecutor in the district attorney’s office who was a key member of the Bike Path Rapist Task Force, said he hopes to “repair” dwindling public confidence and “low” staff morale in the office.
The three registered Democrats all turned up at the Board of Elections on Thursday, the final day to submit designating petitions. Each campaign has until late next week to challenge their opponents’ petitions. The three are vying in the Sept. 9 primary for the Democratic line.
LaVallee was Sedita’s former bureau chief and headed the Sex Crimes Bureau under then District Attorney Kevin M. Dillon. She is now deputy director of the state Tax Department’s special investigations unit.
She pledged to “make the necessary changes” to restore public confidence in the criminal- justice system and remove what she called “the stigma of politics” that tainted the office in recent years.
Case was a 14-year prosecutor in the district attorney’s office who resigned from the legal staff of the State Commission on Judicial Conduct in February to stage his first political campaign. He said, “The fact that I’m not a politician seems to be playing well” with voters.
He said he got into the race to give voters “a choice” and because “Erie County deserves a district attorney who does the right thing under difficult circumstances,” citing the recent cases of Anthony J. Capozzi and Lynn M. DeJac, both of whom were released after being wrongfully imprisoned for years.
Case also cited the indictment and later acquittal of Sheriff’s Deputy George A. Avery Jr. on charges of homosexual rape involving a suspect and what he called his unanimous endorsement by local law enforcement, saying neither of his opponents received a single law enforcement endorsement.
Sedita, one of the area’s most successful homicide prosecutors and the son of a well-known state judge and grandson of one of Buffalo’s most prominent mayors, pledged that under him, every assistant district attorney will return to the courtroom.
Like his opponents, he stressed his nonpolitical nature, saying, “I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a politician.” A prosecutor for 20 years, Sedita said, “I know what it takes to bring cases against the area’s most serious lawbreakers.”
Regardless of the outcome of the Democratic primary, all three will remain on the Nov. 4 general election ballot, with Sedita on the Conservative and Independence party lines, Case on the Working Families line and LaVallee on the Republican line.
