The suit is hogwash. By the time it is fully litigated, if it is ever litigated, there is a strong likelihood that the sanctions against Penn State will have ended. But this is not a suit pivoting on legal merits. This is a suit filed by Corbett to ingratiate himself with the Penn State community and alumni, a valuable source of votes and campaign contributions when he is up for reelection in 2014 and may well face a formidable challenger in the Republican primary.
Democrat Kathleen Kane, a former prosecutor who will take office as Pennsylvania attorney general on Jan. 15, wants to know why the Sandusky investigation—which started in 2008 when Corbett was attorney general—took so long. Given Kane’s experience in child-abuse cases, she insists that in normal circumstances the predatory animal would have been arrested after the first allegation was proven to be founded. It would have gotten him off the street, and nothing would have precluded the state police from further investigation. Instead, a grand jury was impaneled. It went on for more than three years, which kept the predatory animal free to attack until his arrest.
In the meantime, Corbett took close to $202,000 in gubernatorial campaign donations from board members of the charity started by the predatory animal, called Second Mile, according to Deadspin.com. In the meantime, there were all of two state investigators (some say it was only one) assigned to the case of the predatory animal until Corbett became governor in 2011. It was only afterwards that the investigation expanded into the scope it always deserved.
Even then, the investigation showed such apparent sloppiness that it seemed almost willful in trying to protect Penn State officials from extensive damage. It wasn’t until March of 2012 that attorney-general investigators, in concert with Freeh investigators, discovered that Sandusky actually had maintained an office at the university; it was found to house valuable evidence. Nor from all indications did state investigators discover the crucial emails that resulted in the attorney general filing perjury charges against former Penn State president Graham Spanier. They apparently came instead from the Freeh investigation.