Kathleen Kane Trial Day 1: Jury Selection

It’s a show trial, and the old and the new and something blue are on show, not just AG Kathleen Kane.

Inside and out of the Montgomery County courthouse there’s a sense that times are changing, whether Pennsylvania government officials like it or not.

by Bill Keisling

 

Monday, August 8 — The heat that has been building for weeks seems to have stagnated and settled over the mysterious and sleepy Montgomery County courthouse, in Norristown, for the long-awaited criminal trial of Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane.

The unrelenting heat and the stagnation somehow seem appropriate for Kane’s criminal nose, which began with jury selection on Monday.

AG Kane has been accused of leaking grand jury material to the Philadelphia Daily News, for a news story.

That Kane is being prosecuted for this seems rather petty, and risky, in the scheme of things.

But there’s not much at all surprising about it, since Kane’s political enemies have themselves been leaking details of Kane’s case to the Philadelphia papers for most of two years now.

So with the heat and the stagnation there’s a big dose of hypocrisy hanging over the courthouse with the prosecution of AG Kathleen Kane.

Kane arrived at the courthouse at the start of the day looking winsome, though concerned, in a powder-blue suit. With her for the trial were her twin sister, her parents, and supporters from their hometown, Scranton.

Kane some months ago told me that her father can’t watch or read the news about her without getting worked up, and upset.

There’s something wrong in Harrisburg, and in Pennsylvania government, it seems to the folks back in Scranton.

And they’re right. There is something wrong with Pennsylvania government, and the case against Kane, wrapped as it is in skullduggery, pettiness, and obvious hypocrisy.

It’s just difficult to put your finger on what’s wrong, like it’s hard to put your finger on the dark mysteries and intricacies of the Montgomery County courthouse in a sweltering heatwave.

So now her father gets to watch Kathleen stand criminal trial for doing what, it seems, everyone else in Pennsylvania government and courts have been doing all along with impunity: leaking news stories to the Philadelphia newspapers.

As for jury selection: it was a long, hot day at the courthouse.

There were more than 100 perspective jurors.

The jurors were brought into and out of the courtroom in knots of five or six, led around the hallways like those kindergartners you see tied to a rope, to be quizzed about whether they knew anyone connected to the case, or whether they had any preconceived notions about Kane’s prosecution.

Which seemed rather odd.

You’d have to be some sort of social ignoramus not to have heard details about Kane’s case, leaked as they’ve been in the Philly papers all these many months.

But Kane’s fate nonetheless rests in these jurors’ hands. It took all day to pick twelve jurors — six men and six women, and alternates. It wasn’t clear at all which side picked which jurors, or why.

While the prospective jurors were vetted, a dozen or so television trucks, satellite dishes pricked to the sky, waited out the midday heat in front of the courthouse like panting lions.

The television trucks themselves are anachronistic. Their days are numbered; everything those rumbling multi-million dollar TV trucks can do now can be done on a $400 iPhone, tucked into one’s pocket.

The state media, like Pennsylvania government, seems stuck in some vortex of time, tradition, and fading sensibilities.

And all that too seemed today to hang in the air, with the stupefying heat.

Inside and out of the courthouse there’s a sense that times are changing, whether Pennsylvania government officials like it or not.

Most surprisingly, those covering the trial will be allowed to bring laptops into the courtroom to take notes.

That is a big change.

A courthouse employee tells me that the case against comedian Bill Cosby, who is also to be tried in Montgomery County, forced the change to allow laptops into the trial.

The national press showed up at the Cosby hearings and expected to use their laptops in the courtroom.

“That’s the first time I noticed laptops in the courtroom,” this fellow tells me. “At the Cosby case.”

So now this nod to modernity has bled into Kathleen Kane’s case.

We chat a bit about how Montgomery County itself is changing. Once a solid, Republican bedroom community of Philadelphia, now young Democrats are taking over. Democrats now dominate the county’s row offices.

What about all the leaks in this case? I ask the courthouse employee.

He suggests Kane and her defense team themselves have been doing the leaking. He apparently doesn’t want to imagine that anyone in the Montgomery County courthouse would be behind the many leaks.

Kane’s attorney, Gerald Shargel, I point out, is a mob lawyer from Manhattan. Shargel seems genuinely befuddled by Pennsylvania courts and its media.

“Yeah, Shargel knows nothing about Pennsylvania,” this fellow allows.

So how, and why, would Kane’s legal team be leaking to the media? I ask.

He shrugs.

This much is certain: It’s a show trial, and the old and the new and something blue are on show, not just Kathleen Kane.

At the center of it, in her powder blue suit, tight-lipped but obviously pained, comes mystical Kathleen Kane.

She’s a new woman in an old man’s world, a loose cannon, uncontrollable by her political enemies.

These guys, I think, might stop Kathleen Kane.

But they can’t stop the world that’s changing around them.

They are losing their grip, and fading into the past, their memories of how things used to be in Pennsylvania shimmering like mirages, like the heat out in the street.

Maybe that’s what’s really eating them.