[13] On November 29, 2018, she reported to the Montgomery County Correctional Facility to begin serving her 10–to-23-month prison term after having exhausted her appeal efforts.
[18][19] From 1995 to 2007, she served as an assistant district attorney for Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, where she prosecuted hundreds of sex-abuse, elder abuse, murder, assault, rape, public corruption, and fraud cases.
[5] In the general election, Kane won by 14.5 percent over Cumberland County District Attorney David Freed[21] who ran unopposed in the Republican primary.
[22] Kane appointed former federal prosecutor H. Geoffrey Moulton Jr. to investigate Governor Tom Corbett's handling of the Penn State child sex abuse scandal (an investigation which showed that no legal wrongdoing by Corbett took place), and brought criminal charges against former turnpike officials (and then dealt plea bargains with the accused parties, which resulted in none of the accused serving any jail time).
As part of renewed attention in the state to Catholic Church child sexual abuse and cover-up accusations, Kane initiated a statewide grand jury—starting toward establishment in early 2014[27]—and a hotline which garnered another 250 cases to investigate.
Some twenty troopers operated the phones and assistant AG Daniel J. Dye led the case in the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown and was still sifting the other reports in 2016.
[35] The leaks came at a time when Kane was under intense criticism for failure to effectively prosecute Democrats, both in a bribery sting investigation in Philadelphia, and a pay-to-play scandal involving the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Kane believed former state prosecutor Frank Fina was behind a March 2014 story in the Inquirer that disclosed that she had secretly shut down a sting investigation that had recorded Philadelphia Democrats accepting cash, money orders, or gifts from an undercover operative.
In searching for information to discredit Fina, she discovered a trove of emails containing pornography and other offensive content that were exchanged among state prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges, including two former Supreme Court justices.
Porngate, as it came to be called, led to the retirements or resignations of more than a half-dozen high-profile public officials, including onetime Supreme Court Justices Seamus P. McCaffery and J. Michael Eakin.
Kane said repeatedly that she believed her criminal case was "corruptly manufactured" by a club of "good ol' boys" bent on preventing her from making those emails public – although many of them were eventually released.
[36] On January 21, 2015, it was made public that the grand jury recommended criminal charges related to these leaks against Kane for "perjury, false swearing, official oppression and obstruction of law.
On September 21, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unanimously suspended Kane's license to practice law, as a result of the criminal charges.
[40] Subsequently, Kane appointed former Montgomery County District Attorney and County Commissioner Bruce L. Castor, Jr., a Republican, as Solicitor General of Pennsylvania to assume her executive decision making authority, a position Castor retained until becoming acting attorney general for a period after Kane resigned, and before Democratic Governor Tom Wolf could appoint Bruce Beemer to the post.
The court rejected her arguments that the special prosecutor lacked legitimacy and that she should have been allowed to present evidence of a child pornography scandal in the Attorney General's office.