Kathleen Kane, once Pennsylvania attorney general, released from jail

Updated: 10:46 a.m.

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A former Pennsylvania attorney general who served about eight months in jail for leaking grand jury material and lying about it was released Wednesday.

Kathleen Kane left the Montgomery County Correctional Facility in the Philadelphia suburbs about 8:20 a.m. When asked by a reporter how she felt, Kane replied “grateful.”

A Scranton native, Kane was the first Democrat and first woman elected to be the state’s top prosecutor. She resigned after being convicted in 2016 of perjury, obstruction and other counts for leaking grand jury material and lying about it.

A special counsel was named to investigate Kane after former prosecutors with the attorney general’s office reported that secret grand jury material had been leaked to a newspaper.

Kane had said during her unsuccessful appeals that her defense should have been allowed to use a pornographic email scandal within the state’s attorney general’s office and judicial community as well as evidence about the Jerry Sandusky child molestation case that her former office prosecuted before she was elected.

She had also argued that she was wrongly turned down in an effort to keep all Montgomery County judges from handling her case, that evidence against her was illegally obtained and that she had been the victim of selective and vindictive prosecution.

After appeals failed, she turned herself in to the jail in the Philadelphia suburb of Eagleville at the end of November and began serving a 10- to 23-month term. She eventually had a couple months shaved off for good behavior.