NORRISTOWN, Pa. \u2014 The brief, unlikely political career of Kathleen G. Kane, Pennsylvania\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Ms. Kane, 50, rose to power as a Democratic outsider with no political experience, vowing to shake to its foundations the state\u2019s male-dominated, corruption-prone political establishment that she mocked as \u201cthe Harrisburg old boys.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> of two felony perjury charges and seven misdemeanor counts, forcing her to resign from office.<\/p>\n In just her first few months in office, she rejected Mr. Corbett\u2019s plan to privatize management of the state lottery despite intense pressure from the governor, she refused to have her office defend the state\u2019s 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\u2019s office, prompting accusations of nepotism.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 all Democrats from Philadelphia \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 a leak that would lead to the criminal investigation of her actions.<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe I deserve everything I get; they don\u2019t,\u201d she said. \u201cI am not going to ask for your mercy because I don\u2019t care about me any more.\u201d<\/p>\n Imposing a prison sentence, Judge Wendy Demchick-Alloy said, \u201cany 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,\u201d the judge told Ms. Kane, who had no visible reaction.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"