Report on Jerry Sandusky investigation to be released

HARRISBURG, Pa. - A highly anticipated report into how police and prosecutors handled the Jerry Sandusky child molestation case will be released Monday, Pennsylvania's attorney general said.

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.

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.

Two sources who read a draft of the report told CBS News senior producer Pat Milton that the report, while raising some questions about aspects of the investigation, finds overall that the prosecutors, led by former Deputy Chief Frank Fina, acted within the acceptable bounds of prosecutorial discretion.

During her own election 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.

The report to be released on Monday found no evidence electoral politics influenced any important decisions made in the Sandusky case, Milton reports.

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 report to be released Monday found that investigators concluded at the time that charging Sandusky earlier on with one victim may have resulted in a relatively weak case and risked an acquittal of Sandusky, Milton reports. Investigators, the report found, concluded at the time that while they believed the first victim's allegations were true, they felt they needed to corroborate his allegations particularly in light of Sandusky's reputation as assistant football coach of Penn State and his status in the community.

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.

On the use of a grand jury in the investigation, according to sources, the report said that the power of the grand jury proved to be valuable in this case mostly notably in compelling testimony of certain witnesses and in assisting in identifying additional Sandusky witnesses and its use did not appear to slow the investigation.

Questions also had been raised about whether the investigation took as long as it did because of a lack of investigative resources in 2009 and 2010. The review found no evidence of lack of resources.

The report found that one aspect of the investigation that consumed time was investigators difficulty in obtaining records from Penn State officials and "Second Mile," Sandusky's charity for young boys, due in part to their lack of compliance to subpoenas.

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.