THE LEGAL INTELLIGENCER: One of the two Democratic candidates running for state attorney general and her unopposed Republican counterpart took starkly contrasting stances on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act championed by President Obama and the lawsuit filed by several attorneys general challenging the controversial health care reform measure.
Simply put: Former Lackawanna County prosecutor Kathleen Kane, a Democrat, would pull Pennsylvania out of the lawsuit on her “first day in office” if elected, while Republican Cumberland County District Attorney David Freed said he would keep Pennsylvania in the challenge. Calling the legislation “an unconstitutional power grab by the federal government,” Freed said he would protect Pennsylvanians from “such overreaching actions.”
The attorney general hopefuls’ comments came in response to a questionnaire The Legal distributed to all four candidates for Pennsylvania’s chief prosecutor, and health care reform was not the only platform on which Kane and Freed — the two to respond — differed in opinion.
The campaign of former U.S. Rep Patrick Murphy declined to respond to several requests to participate in The Legal’s questionnaire.
Click Here to View Kane’s Responses
Click Here to View Freed’s Responses
Asked about the role of the Attorney General’s Office stemming from a 1998 investigation of former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky conducted by former Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar, Kane said her “first order of business” would be to conduct an investigation to see what the office — then held by current Governor Tom Corbett — knew.
“If the Attorney General’s Office is at fault in any way for not bringing charges against Jerry Sandusky earlier, our investigation will uncover it and ensure it never happens again,” Kane said.
Freed said that after Gricar assumed jurisdiction of the allegations against the coach — allegations on which he never brought charges — the Attorney General’s Office was precluded from stepping in.
“In this tragic circumstance, what the public needs to realize is that because District Attorney Gricar did not initially refer the case to the Attorney General’s Office, that office could not have been involved,” Freed said.
Offering deference to their prosecutorial roots, both agreed that original jurisdiction for allegations of child sex-abuse generally falls to local district attorneys, rather than the state attorney general. However, both said the case against Sandusky makes it clear that the Attorney General’s Office should be a leader in this area of the law.
Since the 1998 investigation, the attorney general has brought two separate indictments against the coach, following a grand jury investigation. Sandusky awaits trial on 52 counts of sex-related crimes.
In another divergence, Kane told The Legal she would add funding to the attorney general’s Bureau of Consumer Protection and Environmental Crimes Section while Freed said that no candidate could answer what units of the office would need funding by the time the next attorney general would assume office.
As he put it, “The issues of today could be completely different tomorrow.”
Kane also pointed to the emergence of fracking as an indicator that the state’s chief law enforcement officer should devote significant resources to the environmental crimes division of the Attorney General’s Office. These resources, she said, would protect Pennsylvania’s citizens and environment from the “gold rush” led by oil and gas companies looking to cash in on Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale formations.
Kane’s opponent in the Democratic primary, former U.S. Representative Patrick Murphy, declined to respond to the questionnaire, the entire results of which are published in today’s Legal. Democratic voters are being asked to select either Murphy or Kane at next Tuesday’s primary election to face Freed and the late-emerging Donald A. Bailey, who is running as an Independent. Bailey, a former auditor general, also did not respond to The Legal’squestionnaire.
Freed and Kane did converge on the notion that, when allegations against a public official surface, partnerships would be paramount.
Specifically, both said the venue in which political corruption cases are tried should be tailored to where prosecutors would find greatest success.
“For various reasons including evidence, resources, witnesses, use of or a need for a grand jury, each case is unique,” Freed said. “My history is one of positioning a case in the venue where it has the best chance to succeed,”
“I do not chase glory. I seek justice, and I have the experience to know where a case needs to go,” he added.
Kane said she would use the attorney general post as a means to forge a partnership with county district attorneys and the U.S. Attorney’s Office to ensure corruption investigations receive comprehensive treatment.
“Political corruption cases are no place for a prosecutorial ‘turf-war’ to be waged,” Kane said. “As public servants, we owe it to the people of Pennsylvania to ensure that their elected officials are operating within the laws, and when they are not, that they are swiftly and efficiently brought to justice by any means necessary.”
Asked to define “honest services fraud,” Freed said the Pennsylvania Crimes Code did not contain a specific crime with that title, but noted that most political corruption cases involve charges of theft and conflict of interest.
According to Kane, honest services fraud breaks down into two categories: fraud committed by public officials and fraud committed by private citizens who have a fiduciary obligation to whomever becomes their victim.
The former, she noted, typically involves a bribe or undisclosed conflict of interest, while the latter involves a knowing or foreseeable breach of fiduciary duty leading to financial harm on the part of a victim.
Source: http://www.law.com/jsp/pa/PubArticlePA.jsp?id=1202549178192
