Kathleen Kane Is Sentenced to Prison

NORRISTOWN, Pa. — The brief, unlikely political career of Kathleen G. Kane, Pennsylvania’s brightest rising star when she was elected state attorney general less than four years ago, came to a humiliating close on Monday, when a judge sentenced her to 10 to 23 months in prison for her conviction on charges of perjury and abuse of her office.

Ms. Kane, 50, rose to power as a Democratic outsider with no political experience, vowing to shake to its foundations the state’s male-dominated, corruption-prone political establishment that she mocked as “the Harrisburg old boys.” At times she succeeded, forcing the ouster of State Supreme Court justices, prosecuting government officials, and clashing repeatedly with one of her predecessors, Tom Corbett, a Republican who had become governor.

But she soon created a scandal of her own, fueled by abuse of power and sensitivity to criticism, illegally leaking grand jury records in an attempt to discredit a critic, and then lying about it to a different grand jury. In August, a Court of Common Pleas jury here found her guilty of two felony perjury charges and seven misdemeanor counts, forcing her to resign from office.

In just her first few months in office, she rejected Mr. Corbett’s plan to privatize management of the state lottery despite intense pressure from the governor, she refused to have her office defend the state’s ban on gay marriage in court, she offered only a lukewarm defense of a voter identification law that a court eventually struck down, and she exposed corruption at the state Turnpike Commission. She also gave a promotion to her twin sister, who had worked for years in the attorney general’s office, prompting accusations of nepotism.

In those first months, she also shut down a secret sting case that had started under Mr. Corbett, and had recorded four state legislators and a judge — all Democrats from Philadelphia — accepting illegal gifts. A year later, when the Philadelphia Inquirer revealed that the operation had taken place and that Ms. Kane had shut it down, she faced claims of partisan favoritism. Ms. Kane said that the cases were mismanaged and were too weak to prosecute; local prosecutors later proved her wrong, winning convictions against four of the five officials.

Her actions led to a feud with Frank G. Fina, a former top state prosecutor who had overseen both the sting operation and the Sandusky case. Seeking to undercut Mr. Fina, Ms. Kane leaked to the Philadelphia Daily News information about a grand jury investigation he had been involved in — a leak that would lead to the criminal investigation of her actions.

“Maybe I deserve everything I get; they don’t,” she said. “I am not going to ask for your mercy because I don’t care about me any more.”

Imposing a prison sentence, Judge Wendy Demchick-Alloy said, “any lesser sentence than total confinement will absolutely depreciate the seriousness of the crime.A violation of this magnitude and severity is an extraordinary abuse of the system,” the judge told Ms. Kane, who had no visible reaction.