Fairfax's Longtime Prosecutor To Depart
Horan Presided Over Noted Cases In His 40 Years

By Tom Jackman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

In an increasingly complex legal world, Robert F. Horan Jr. keeps it old school. He typically shows up for hearings, and trials, by himself -- no legal assistants, no junior prosecutors. A legal pad. A case file. Maybe a law book.

Fairfax County's chief prosecutor for 40 years sits with the other lawyers on Friday motions days, waiting for his case to be called like everyone else. The judges tend to call his first, though. His office doesn't have a Web page. Or a spokesman. He doesn't have voice mail.

But the old school is closing. Horan announced yesterday that he will not run for an 11th term. His hearing is failing, he said, though it has been for years, and he wasn't sure he could serve four more years, though his health is good.

When other prosecutors have long since staked out a daily tee time or abandoned the courtroom for administrative tasks, Horan, 74, continues to try cases. Next month, he and his chief deputy will tackle a double-murder death penalty trial with no witnesses and no statement from the defendant, in what probably will be Horan's swan song.

His departure as the longest-serving prosecutor in Virginia -- "the bull prosecutor," he has often called himself -- opens the door for a mad scramble to succeed him, because the filing deadline for the Democratic and Republican primaries is Friday.

Even as Horan has resisted change, the county has exploded around him, growing from a sleepy community of about 261,000 to a diverse, sprawling suburb with more than a million people. Alumni of his office have gone on to become judges at the state Supreme Court, appeals court, circuit and district courts, as well as commonwealth's attorneys, federal prosecutors and state legislators.

"I think it's time to go," Horan said he concluded after a "most miserable 30 days" of agonizing over his decision. "One day I was up, one day I was no. I've changed my mind three times in the past weeks."

And so he will go. His longtime chief deputy, Raymond F. Morrogh, said he plans to seek the Democratic nomination. Mike Thompson Jr., the acting chair of the Fairfax Republican Committee, said he fielded numerous calls yesterday, and it appeared that at least one candidate would submit petitions and a filing fee by Friday for the Republican ticket.

Lawyers, both locally and nationally, reflected yesterday on the end of an era. The man who was personally selected by the U.S. attorney general to try one of the first sniper cases, and who prosecuted the shooter of five people outside CIA headquarters in 1993 from incident to execution, was stepping down.

"Bob is really a legend in the prosecution community," said Joshua Marquis, a vice president of the National District Attorneys Association and a county prosecutor in northwestern Oregon. "One reason is, he has consistently continued to try large numbers of cases while running a large office, which is virtually unheard of in the U.S. Very few people do it."

In 2003, when the district attorneys association issued its first lifetime achievement award, they gave it to Horan. And that was before he and Morrogh tried the capital case against Lee Boyd Malvo, one of the two sniper suspects arrested in the killings of 10 people in the Washington area a year earlier.

The trial, which was moved to Chesapeake, Va., was exhausting for Horan and Morrogh, who both battled respiratory infections. But for his closing argument, Horan stood sturdily three feet from the jury, without notes or a podium to lean on.

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."