Former Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane’s fight to reverse her perjury conviction reached the state Superior Court Wednesday, another milestone in a long march that so far has kept Kane from serving a county jail sentence.
Her appeals lawyer, Joshua D. Lock, appeared before a three-judge panel to ask it to undo Kane's August 2016 conviction of illegally leaking grand jury information to embarrass a political foe and then lying to investigators about it.
In addressing the court panel Wednesday, Mr. Lock focused on one argument — that the special prosecutor who investigated Ms. Kane had been granted too much power.
Ms. Kane, 51 and a Scranton-area resident, did not attend Wednesday’s court session in Philadelphia. Facing 10 to 23 months in the Montgomery County jail, Ms. Kane remains free while she pursues her appeal in the state courts.
Ms. Kane was the first woman and Democrat elected the state’s top prosecutor. The path to her conviction was a convoluted one that began when the Inquirer disclosed in 2014 that Ms. Kane had secretly ended a bribery investigation involving state legislators from Philadelphia.
To retaliate against a former state prosecutor whom she blamed for the story, Ms. Kane leaked secret grand jury information that she thought would embarrass the prosecutor.
The plot backfired. The judge who presided over the grand jury appointed a special prosecutor, Thomas Carluccio, to investigate the leak. After subpoenaing 30 witnesses, Mr. Carluccio pinned it on Ms. Kane and accused her of lying about her actions. Building on Mr. Carluccio's inquiry, county prosecutors in Montgomery County, where the grand jury had been based, brought the criminal case against Ms. Kane.
Ms. Kane initially challenged the legality of Mr. Carluccio’s appointment before her trial in an appeal to the State Supreme Court. The high court rebuffed her 4-1.
Mr. Lock argued Wednesday that another issue remained unresolved: whether Mr. Carluccio had been improperly granted the ability to use subpoenas to forces witnesses to testify.
Mr. Lock asked the Superior Court panel to toss out Ms. Kane's conviction on grounds that Mr. Carluccio’s use of subpoenas fatally tainted his investigation.
Prosecutors argued that stripping special prosecutors of subpoena power would neuter them. In court Wednesday, Montgomery County Deputy District Attorney Robert M. Falin argued a different point: that county prosecutors on their own had turned up the key evidence against Ms. Kane apart from Mr. Carluccio’s investigation. Among other breakthroughs, he said, was the discovery of incriminatory text messages between Ms. Kane and a political consultant involved in the grand jury leak.
The Superior Court panel was made up of two Democrats, Anne E. Lazarus and Carolyn H. Nichols, and a Republican, Paula F. Ott. It made no ruling Wednesday and is under no time constraint to rule.
If the panel were to rule against her, Ms. Kane could appeal to the state Supreme Court, which is not required to take up the case.
First Published: January 18, 2018, 5:03 p.m.