Norristown, Pa.
“The case is about ego, ego of a politician consumed by her image from Day 1,” Judge Wendy Demchick-Alloy told her at the end of a five-hour hearing in Norristown. “And instead of focusing solely on basis of fighting crime, the focus was battling these perceived enemies … and utilizing and exploiting her position to do it.”
Kane, 50, had pleaded for leniency, urging the judge to consider the impact incarceration might have on her two teenage sons.
“I would cut off my right arm if they were separated from me and I from them,” Kane said, crying. “Please sentence me and not them.”
The judge was not swayed.
“It’s a shame that they have to go through all this,” Demchick-Alloy told her, “but that’s a decision you made, not this court.”
As the proceeding ended, Kane hugged her older son and was led from the courtroom in handcuffs, unable to immediately post $75,000 bail.
The sentence marks a bitter end to a brief career that drew national attention early on when she became the first Democrat and first woman elected as attorney general of Pennsylvania.
Her downfall began when she leaked confidential grand jury material two years ago to a newspaper in a bid to embarrass a political enemy, and then lied about her actions under oath. After a trial in August, a jury found her guilty of perjury, obstruction and other charges.
At the sentencing, Kane did not directly apologize for her crimes but rather for the consequences of her actions, saying she never intended to hurt anyone and feels sorry if Pennsylvanians have lost their sense of trust in the Attorney General’s Office.
Kane, who is in the throes of a divorce, repeatedly cited the impact on her two sons, 14 and 15.
The older boy, Christopher, told the judge he wanted to testify “because maybe things weren’t looking good and I decided I needed to help.”
Through tears, he said: “I just wanted to say my mom is like my rock. She is there for me for everything. For her to leave me, that would be … it’d be bad.”
Kane’s lawyer, Marc R. Steinberg, argued that her safety could be in jeopardy if she is imprisoned. He also said Kane’s unprecedented fall from grace had been a punishment in itself.
“She stands a convicted felon subject to public shame and public humiliation,” Steinberg said. “She’s been punished, judge.”
But prosecutors called both current and former members of the Attorney General’s Office to describe the culture of fear and paranoia that developed under her leadership.
Erik Olsen, a top prosecutor, said he was ecstatic when Kane won the election in 2012, thinking her victory would bring a much-needed fresh perspective to the office.
Instead, he said, “through a pattern of firings and Nixonian espionage, she created a terror zone in this office.”
Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele asked the judge to impose consecutive, instead of concurrent, prison terms on Kane for each of her crimes.
“What I struggled with is she knew better,” Steele told the judge. ” … But knowing better didn’t matter.”
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Winning office in a landslide in 2012 — running well ahead of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama — Kane had a resoundingly successful first year in office. She drew attention for her stands in support of marriage equality and gun control and for crippling Republican Gov. Tom Corbett’s move to privatize the lottery — all positions that her lawyers cited last week in arguing for house arrest.
But unbeknownst to the public, Kane in her first year was also making a secret decision that would, by a complex path, lead to her demise.
In taking office, Kane inherited an undercover investigation begun three years before, when Corbett was attorney general. An accused thief, seeking leniency on charges of stealing from a state food program, had agreed to wear a wire and make cash payments to politicians. In then end, the operative, Tyron Ali, ensnared six officials from Philadelphia — five legislators and a Traffic Court judge, all Democrats — on tape pocketing money, or, in the case of the judge, a $2,000 Tiffany bracelet.
But Kane chose not to prosecute the six or notify ethics officials of their activities. Instead, she shut the case down under a court seal.
When The Philadelphia Inquirer broke the news of her decisions months later, in early 2014, Kane reacted angrily. “This is war,” she wrote in an email to a political consultant, later shown to jurors at her trial.
Kane blamed The Inquirer’s story on a former top state prosecutor, Frank Fina, who had launched the sting. Even as she suffered a wave a bad publicity for her sting decision — Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams later resurrected the cases and has won five convictions so far — Kane quickly began plotting a counterstrike against Fina.
She surreptitiously passed the secret grand jury material to the Philadelphia Daily News to underpin a story she believed would reflect badly on Fina by suggesting that he, too, had failed to aggressively pursue a criminal investigation.
The story rehashed an old investigation into allegations that a prominent Philadelphia civil rights leader, J. Whyatt Mondesire, might have misused state money. Prosecutors said that Kane was so intent on getting even with Fina that she was heedless to the impact on Mondesire. Mondesire, who was never charged with any crime, died last year.
In charging Kane in August 2015, Risa Vetri Ferman, the Montgomery County district attorney at the time, said Kane had pursued her agenda “without regard to rules, without regard to the law, and without regard to collateral damage the battle might entail.”
For her part, Kane cast herself as a victim of a “Good Ol’ Boys club” — an argument that gained headway after she discovered that her office’s email servers had been a hub for the exchange of pornographic emails among prosecutors in her office and their friends elsewhere. The scandal she ignited over the emails ending up costing several top officials their jobs, including two state Supreme Court justices.
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But when Kane sought to invoke the porn controversy as a defense in court, prosecutors denounced it as irrelevant to the charges against her. The judge, Demchick-Alloy, a Republican and a former prosecutor, barred mention of the issue at the trial.
Kane did not take the stand in her own defense during the trial and her defense called no witnesses, thinking they could prevail by poking holes in the government’s witnesses, a string of former or current Kane aides.
But the jury deliberated only 4½ hours before convicting her of every charge — two felony counts of perjury and seven misdemeanor counts of charges ranging from obstructing the administration of law to engaging in official oppression.
She resigned a day later.