Do NOT leave it alone and move on.
Expired domains are pure gold. I buy spammed domains constantlly. Not all obviously.
There is few reasons why I do that.
If you do it right you can have great use of them. If you did good research and found out it has duplicated content than work on removing penalized content and submit website to Google for penalty remove.
Other option, remove duplicated page, set website up on server and let the time go by.
What you do in the meantime?
Let's say domain is healthytips.com, put keywords like:
healthy tips
tips for health
effective healthy tips
In keyword tracker, mark to check also other search engines. If the website show up in SERP somewhere than is great sign. you can use it as strong PBN as example. I wouldn't use it for money site if website can't reach 2nd or 3rd page.
Remember that this only Google penalty, have you checked Bing and !Yahoo ?
I hope you got my idea. If you are still not sure about it than show me domain via PM, I will buy it after my check up

good luck