Well, yes, you could simply delete the old site and use the content on a new site. But you are not gonna get your ranking back, since the site will be a brand new one, and we know that links rank pages not content, so just because you have the same content of the old site, doesn't mean your new site is going to gain the same old ranks that your old site had.
Having said that, I read somewhere (can't recall where, but it was one of those "respected" seo blogs that one of their clients had gain their ranking back by simply deleting the page that had caused the penalty. So, if you were building most of your link to a main money page (not the index page of course), you could delete that page, and since all those links will go to 404, presumably the penalty will be lifted.
