HARRISBURG, Pa. — A highly anticipated report into how police and prosecutors handled the Jerry Sandusky child molestation case will be released early next week, Pennsylvania’s attorney general said Friday.
The 2011 arrest of the former Penn State assistant football coach came nearly three years after the investigation began with a complaint from a student in central Pennsylvania, raising questions about how it proceeded under Attorney General Kathleen Kane during her successful 2012 election campaign.
The review by law professor and former federal prosecutor Geoff Moulton will be released Monday morning at a Capitol news conference.
Kane, a Democrat, has suggested that then-Attorney General Tom Corbett had a political motivation to slow the investigation while he was running for governor in 2010, something Corbett has strongly denied. Corbett, a Republican, is now running for a second term as governor.
Sandusky was convicted of 45 counts of sexual abuse of 10 boys and is serving a lengthy prison sentence.
During her own campaign, Kane suggested to the editorial board of the Times-Tribune of Scranton that Corbett’s decisions regarding the Sandusky investigation may have been affected by campaign contributions from members of the Penn State board of trustees and from donors linked to Sandusky’s State College-based charity, The Second Mile.
Corbett has defended the handling of the Sandusky case, noting it resulted in the former coach’s conviction and saying it took time for the investigators to develop the witnesses who would eventually testify at trial.
The attorney general’s office took over the case early in 2009 after the county prosecutor raised a conflict of interest.
Kane said several months ago that Moulton’s investigation was delayed because it took time to recover emails thought to have been permanently deleted. The Sandusky scandal led to the firing of Hall of Fame football coach Joe Paterno and the ouster of Penn State president Graham Spanier, among other major changes to the university’s leadership.
The school eventually accepted a consent agreement with the NCAA under which Penn State forfeited 112 wins from Paterno’s later years, received a four-year ban on post-season play, was hit with a temporary reduction in football scholarships and agreed to pay a $60 million fine.
Spanier and two retired administrators, former athletic director Tim Curley and former vice president Gary Schultz, await trial in Harrisburg on charges they participated in a criminal cover-up of complaints about Sandusky. The three men all deny those allegations, and no trial date has been set.
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