Fairfax's Longtime Prosecutor To Depart

For 45 minutes, as the national media looked on, Horan ridiculed the defense notion of a "new Malvo," no longer under the control of John Allen Muhammad.

"Fact of the matter is, that's the real Malvo, the one who killed that lady at the Home Depot," Horan intoned. The jury then convicted the teenager of capital murder but declined to impose the death penalty.

"He's probably one of the greatest attorneys I ever had to go to battle with," one of Malvo's defense attorneys, Michael S. Arif, said yesterday. "And the single greatest prosecutor I ever dealt with."

He said one of Horan's defining skills was his ability to "cite chapter and verse of the law. And he'd say, 'It's because I tried all those cases.' "

Horan helped form the state's association of commonwealth's attorneys. The award the association gives to honor a prosecutor each year is the Robert F. Horan Jr. Award.

"When that gets handed out," said Michael E. McGinty, the commonwealth's attorney for Williamsburg, the honoree "always mentions how humbled they are to receive an award that bears his name."

Horan does not often seek the death penalty, and no one has received it in Fairfax since 1997, when he prosecuted Mir Aimal Kasi for killing two people and wounding three others outside the CIA in 1993. Kasi was executed in 2002.

Horan said his most satisfying case was not a murder trial. It was the prosecution of Caleb D. Hughes for the abduction of 5-year-old Melissa Brannen from a 1989 Christmas party. Melissa's body was never found, but Hughes was convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison.

"It was such an emotional case, and it had such a hold on me," Horan said. "Just a beautiful little girl. She's at a party; all of a sudden, she's gone. I always thought she'd be found. It stayed with me for a lot of years. It was a really tough case to try. Strictly circumstantial -- hairs and fibers."

Horan is a native of New Jersey, a graduate of the Marine Corps and Georgetown law school. He served as an assistant prosecutor in Fairfax from 1963 to 1965, worked as a defense lawyer for two years and was appointed commonwealth's attorney in March 1967. He won his first election that November and has been opposed only twice since 1975, the last time in 1995. He almost certainly would not have been opposed this year.

He has won dozens of high-profile cases: The 1976 conviction of James L. Breeden for herding five people into a walk-in freezer and killing four at a Roy Rogers restaurant in the Landmark area. The 1979 conviction of biker gang leader Alexander "Head" Akers for two murders near Tysons Corner. To this day, he can recount precise details of those and thousands of other cases with uncanny accuracy.

"He's as sharp today as he was 30 years ago," said defense attorney Jonathan Shapiro.

The defense bar is not completely enamored of Horan. He has long had a far more restrictive view of what to provide defense lawyers -- no police reports, no witness statements -- than other area prosecutors. Horan said he simply abides by Virginia court rules, which defense lawyers acknowledge is true.

And Horan has stood firm amid controversy. The NAACP demonstrated when Horan declined to prosecute Prince George's County police corporal Carlton Jones, who mistakenly followed and then shot an unarmed man, Prince Jones, in the back in the Falls Church area in 2000. Prince Jones's family later won a wrongful death suit against the officer.

Horan was also criticized for declining to prosecute Fairfax police officer Deval V. Bullock, who killed an unarmed suspect, Salvatore J. Culosi, last year in what Horan said was an accidental shooting.

The controversies do not seem to have affected his decision as much as his loss of hearing -- "I worry that I miss stuff," he said of his time in court -- and his uncertainty about being "prepared to serve four years."

In the end, he decided, "Forty years is probably enough. The public has been kind enough to put up with me for 40 years. I want to leave on good terms."