[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 176 (Thursday, December 12, 2013)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1857-E1859]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                THE RETIREMENT OF JUDGE THOMAS D. HORNE

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. FRANK R. WOLF

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, December 12, 2013

  Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize and honor Judge 
Thomas D. Horne, an integral member of Loudoun County's justice system 
for more than three decades, who retired at the beginning of this 
month.
  Judge Horne graduated from Muhlenberg College in 1965 and went on to 
attend William and Mary Law School, where he earned his law degree in 
1969. He began his career as a judge advocate for the Marines and in 
1979, his love of the courtroom led him to become the county's first 
elected commonwealth's attorney. In 1982, he was appointed to the 
Loudoun Circuit Court and since then has heard some of Loudoun's most 
prominent cases, including the 2002 first-degree murder trial of Claire 
Schwartz, who was found guilty of killing her father, as well as the 
nation's first ``spam'' case involving email advertisements.
  Although he is one Virginia's most respected circuit court judges and 
described by his colleagues a ``the epitome of fairness''--his 
leadership extends far beyond the courtroom. He helped create a bench 
book for judges in Virginia, which has become an indispensable resource 
for those involved in the legal profession. Additionally, he 
spearheaded the nation's first victim-witness program and started a 
week-long law camp mentoring teenagers interested in law.
  Outside of the legal realm, Judge Horne serves his community in other 
ways. In the 1980's he played an important role in the development of 
youth soccer programs in Loudoun and later formed the Loudoun County 
Youth Lacrosse League.
  I have had the privilege of knowing Tom for many years. I hope that 
he enjoys retirement with his wife, Patricia, and their children, Rob 
and Jennifer, and grandchildren, knowing that he has been a pillar of 
the Loudoun community for decades. I wish him all the best and thank 
him for his outstanding service, both inside and outside of the 
courtroom.
  I submit the following Leesburg Today article on Judge Horne's 
remarkable accomplishments.

                [From the Leesburg Today, Dec. 5, 2013]

The Epitome of Fairness': Horne Retires, After Three Decades On Loudoun 
                                 Bench

                       (By Erika Jacobson Moore)

       Sitting in his office at the Loudoun County Courthouse, 
     Judge Thomas D. Horne is reminiscing about his high school 
     football coach in Baltimore. After being cut during tryouts 
     for other sports, Horne saw a flyer about a meeting for 
     football. So he went. There, coach George Young--a future New 
     York Giants general manager and NFL vice president--told the 
     group, ``I won't cut you. You'll cut yourself.'' Horne joined 
     the football team and Young became a mentor to the teenager. 
     Then, when it came time for Horne to consider college, Young 
     stepped up.
       ``I didn't have any money, but every weekend he took me to 
     see schools,'' Horne remembered. That was when Horne first 
     learned anything about Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. 
     ``I didn't know what it was. I thought it must have been in 
     Germany somewhere. But he said, `This is the school for you.' 
     So I went.''
       It was his time at Muhlenberg that put Horne on the path 
     that eventually led him to Loudoun, where he spent more than 
     three decades as a cornerstone in the county's legal system.
       ``The point is: you can make a difference in someone else's 
     life. And you should,'' he said.
       It is with that philosophy that Horne has approached his 
     life and more than 30 years on the bench in Loudoun's 
     courtrooms. This week marks the first time since the late 
     1970s that Horne is not a formal part of

[[Page E1858]]

     Loudoun's legal landscape. Horne retired from the bench Dec. 
     1, a result of the Virginia requirement that judges retire 
     when they reach age 70. He plans to continue on a part-time 
     basis after the New Year until the General Assembly appoints 
     his replacement.
       ``I try to set an attitude in the courtroom that respects 
     everybody,'' he said. ``You have to make people understand 
     that you are listening. That is sometimes all people want.'' 
     Known for often taking cases ``under advisement'' before 
     issuing an opinion or ruling, Horne said that is 
     intentional--designed to give him time to really examine the 
     arguments and consider both sides.
       ``You have to be able to look at things objectively . . . 
     people can disagree with whether you came up with the right 
     or wrong answer, that's one of the great things about this 
     system. But you have to take the time,'' he said, adding with 
     a laugh, ``Of course, I always think I came up with the right 
     answer.''
       Horne's strides to ensure fairness and compassion were 
     always present in his courtroom, according to those who have 
     watched his career. Leesburg attorney Rhonda Paice, who 
     credits Horne with her decision to become a lawyer, said 
     Horne is ``the epitome of everything I thought was right with 
     that [legal] profession.'' In high school, Paice shadowed 
     Horne when he was an assistant commonwealth's attorney and 
     then worked as his courtroom clerk the summer after she 
     graduated from college in 1983.
       ``He was an extremely skilled trial attorney,'' she 
     recalled. ``He was very polished in the courtroom. But he 
     never really took advantage.
       ``Everything he did as a prosecutor it was really him 
     thinking, is this furthering the ends of justice? He was just 
     really advanced at walking the line between doing his job as 
     a prosecutor, but doing it in the right circumstances and 
     giving people a break when they needed it.''
       Bill Mims, who was elected to serve as a justice on the 
     Supreme Court of Virginia in 2010, practiced law in front of 
     Horne when he was an attorney in Loudoun, and echoed those 
     sentiments. In an email, Mims harkened back to the words of 
     U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who said, 
     ``Justice is fairness.''
       ``Judge Horne is the epitome of fairness,'' Mims wrote. 
     ``He always applies the law faithfully, but also with equity. 
     A judge can receive no higher praise.''
       Clerk of the Circuit Court Gary Clemens first met Horne in 
     the early 1990s, when he was a witness in a domestic case. 
     ``Even at that point I was very impressed with his demeanor, 
     his compassion and actual interest in the people who were 
     before him with a court proceeding,'' Clemens said. When 
     Clemens became an investigator with the Commonwealth's 
     Attorney's Office a few years later, he began spending more 
     time in Horne's courtroom.
       ``You could tell he had respect for everyone who appeared 
     before him, even the criminal defendants,'' he said. ``He 
     ensured those rights were upheld. You could tell that with 
     the way he was talking and how he treated them he wasn't 
     really judging them, he was just upholding the law and 
     applying the law.''
       The Loudoun Circuit Court has been stretched this year with 
     Horne and Judge Burke F. McCahill picking up additional cases 
     after the General Assembly failed to appoint a replacement 
     for Judge James Chamblin, who retired in April. Judge Stephen 
     E. Sincavage was appointed by Gov. Bob McDonnell this summer, 
     but must be confirmed by the state legislature in the 
     upcoming session.
       Even with the additional work in his final year, a week 
     before his retirement Horne said he was in position to have 
     everything on his docket completed before he left.
       That comes as no surprise to the people who know him best, 
     many who touted his work ethic on the bench. Clemens says 
     there are many nights when Horne would be the last one 
     working in the courthouse, ``sometimes as late as 8 p.m. and 
     I would go down the hall and his light is on and he is in 
     there.
       ``He just has that commitment to the profession,'' Clemens 
     said. ``Most importantly it was his commitment to the people 
     involved. These were people with a very important issue in 
     their lives and he realized that. So he was willing to work 
     very late at night or even come in on the weekends.''
       After graduating from Muhlenberg in 1965, Horne went to the 
     College of William and Mary, earning his law degree in 1969 
     and then serving as a judge advocate in the Marines. 
     Eventually, Horne and his family moved to Leesburg.
       ``At the start of my career, it was a completely different 
     place,'' he said, recalling his practice was set up in a 
     building with doctors' offices and he ``always had pregnant 
     women and people with eye problems dropping in 
     accidentally.'' Horne served as an assistant commonwealth's 
     attorney in the 1970s--it was a part-time position so he kept 
     his private practice as well.
       ``You were on a first-name basis with everyone,'' he said. 
     ``But in 1972, Leesburg was still a fairly closed society. 
     The newspaper was still really a society column, about who 
     was vacationing . . . and I'm just a guy who moved here from 
     Reston with my family.''
       In 1979, he campaigned to be the county's first elected 
     commonwealth's attorney. Horne said he felt drawn to public 
     service. ``I love the courtroom. I love the challenge of the 
     courtroom,'' he said.
       Former Clerk of the Court Fred Howard first got to know 
     Horne during that 1979 campaign, and he recalls Horne's 
     commitment coming through as he campaigned. ``He walked all 
     the way across Loudoun County,'' Howard said. ``He would stop 
     and do campaign stops along the way, but he walked the entire 
     county. I even wrote a song for his campaign . . . he walked 
     `from the hills of Northern Loudoun to the plains of Sterling 
     Park'.''
       After Horne was elected Commonwealth's Attorney, Howard 
     said he always was struck by how dedicated to the legal 
     process he was, with one case coming to mind immediately. A 
     man had been charged with breaking and entering, but said he 
     was innocent because he had been at McDonald's at the time of 
     the crime--even going so far as to say what he ate. Horne 
     went back and checked the man's alibi, finding out that the 
     day of the crime was the only day that restaurant had ever 
     been closed.
       ``He was always very thorough,'' Howard recalled. ``The 
     look on that boy's face was priceless.''
       Since being appointed to the Loudoun Circuit Court in 1982, 
     Horne has presided over some of Loudoun's most well known 
     cases--from one of the earliest ``shaken baby'' manslaughter 
     cases in 1995, which ended in a mistrial and resulted in a 
     guilty plea to a child abuse charge, to the 2002 first-degree 
     murder trial of Clara Schwartz, who was found guilty of 
     killing her father and luring two men into the plot.
       He also heard the first SPAM case in the country, where he 
     sentenced a North Carolina man to prison for flooding AOL 
     accounts with thousands of bulk email advertisements. The 
     case was tried in Loudoun because AOL is located in the 
     county. The Virginia Supreme Court later deemed the anti-spam 
     statute in the Virginia State Code unconstitutional, 
     something Horne had called into question when imposing his 
     sentence.
       There was the 1999 case where the ability of the Washington 
     Metropolitan Airports Authority, which is made up of 
     representatives of Maryland, Virginia and DC, to condemn land 
     in Virginia was challenged. ``That was interesting,'' Horne 
     said, ``because it involved the Compact Clause of the 
     Constitution.'' The Compact Clause states that without the 
     consent of Congress no state can enter into an agreement or 
     compact with another state.
       ``Whoever thought I would be hearing a case like that here 
     in Loudoun County?'' Horne said with a smile.
       And then, of course, for years, Horne has heard land use 
     case after land use case as Loudoun's development ramped up. 
     ``In the early 2000s there was always some sort of land use 
     case on the docket,'' he said. And many of them brought up 
     complicated legal questions, and involved multiple 
     plaintiffs.
       He handled legal challenges that resulted from a large-
     scale Board of Supervisors-initiated downzoning. ``You're 
     working on rezonings with 200 plaintiffs and all these 
     lawyers at the top of their game and it's just you,'' Horne 
     said, acknowledging he appreciates ``good lawyering'' in his 
     courtroom.
       Domestic relations cases were always a staple of Horne's 
     docket, including divorce and child custody cases. In those, 
     he often got the ``greatest satisfaction'' because ``in some 
     of these cases the parents are just litigating constantly.''
       ``It's when I hear from one of those kids and they say they 
     have bonded again with both parents that I get such a sense 
     of satisfaction,'' he said, recalling one case in particular, 
     in which a wife did not want her husband to have any contact 
     with their children. The father was going overseas to Iraq 
     and ``I was able to create a moment'' for the father and his 
     children, Horne recalled. ``He ended up going over there and 
     he was killed. And that was the last moment they had 
     together.''
       Horne's influence in the courtroom stretches beyond 
     Leesburg, as well. He was an integral part of the effort to 
     create the bench book for judges in the commonwealth. The 
     book serves as a reference for judges, attorneys and other 
     members of the legal profession.
       He also worked on the judicial boundary realignment that 
     benchmarks how many judges are needed in Virginia, and in 
     specific localities, based on the number of case hours 
     worked, the number of cases and how many judges are needed to 
     handle the total. The document easily makes the case, Horne 
     said, for the need to fill his position quickly, and to add a 
     fourth judge in the circuit court in Loudoun.
       Horne recalled how he recently had someone tell him they 
     had never seen him get upset until he had to tell someone 
     that he could not hear their case. ``We just don't have the 
     manpower,'' he said of Loudoun's Circuit Court.
       The ability to make a difference also drove Horne's work 
     outside the courtroom.
       As a prosecutor he helped start the county's victim-witness 
     program, the first of its kind in the nation. ``You are 
     trying to bring [victims] a sense of closure. That is really 
     what this is all about; you're trying to reach that closure 
     for people,'' he said.
       More than a dozen years ago, he started Law Camp for high 
     school students in the 20th Judicial Circuit, which brings 
     lawyers together to train students to conduct moot court 
     trials, give speeches and hear from guest speakers. Paice 
     recalled being called into Horne's office with a couple other 
     attorneys.
       He said, I have this idea and I want to do this camp, a 
     sleepover that will last a week, and we'll have lawyers who 
     will mentor

[[Page E1859]]

     [teenagers] and then Friday they will try a case,'' Paice 
     said. ``We all sort of looked at each other like, you want to 
     what now? He said he thought it was a worthwhile project for 
     the Loudoun Bar. He thought the legal profession gets a bad 
     rap, and it can be hard for kids to see how much good lawyers 
     can do. He said, `I think that is a really good program to 
     showcase the things that lawyers do in the community.' ''
       Ian Duggan, a Loudoun Valley High School graduate, 
     participated in law camp in 2002. Now a JAG serving in 
     Turkey, he credits his interest in law directly to his 
     interactions with Horne. Duggan first met Horne in the eighth 
     grade, when Horne was coaching him in lacrosse and ``knew 
     [Horne] had a passion for the law.'' Then when he got into 
     high school and participated in law camp, it further spurred 
     his interest in the legal profession.
       ``Looking at him as a lawyer, he is a good example of what 
     you want to be,'' Duggan said in a phone interview from 
     Turkey. ``I saw the way people respected him. He did a good 
     job of bringing a lot of people from the Bar out and 
     supporting the effort. Not many people could do that.''
       Horne, along with McCahill, also presided over Loudoun's 
     Drug Court until the Board of Supervisors cut its funding 
     last year. A common target for budget cuts before it was 
     eliminated in 2012, Horne often spoke passionately about the 
     program and the impact it can have, telling supervisors in 
     2009 that he would ``rather take home hours of homework'' 
     than see the program cut.
       He calls his work for the community ``an extension of being 
     a judge.''
       ``I tell the new judges--that is my advice--don't go and 
     hide. Don't sit up on high. Be out in the community; get out 
     with people. Yes, you have your judicial ethics, and you 
     don't talk about your cases, but you need to talk with 
     people, and know them and understand them. You need to 
     understand people,'' he said.
       And Horne's influence on Loudoun's community stretches far 
     beyond the legal system. In the early 1980s, he helped youth 
     soccer form in the county, and at the end of that decade he 
     formed the Loudoun County Youth Lacrosse League. The sport 
     was one of his passions growing up, and one he passed on to 
     his son, Rob.
       ``I distinctly remember our first catch, I had my baseball 
     mitt and then we would trade off [with the lacrosse stick],'' 
     Rob Horne said. ``I really took to it very quickly. I think 
     he saw how passionate I was about the sport, and he wanted to 
     provide me with an outlet . . . and in 1989 he founded 
     lacrosse in the county.''
       Rob Horne said his father is his hero, in no small part 
     because of his passion for his community and his ability to 
     be just as passionate about his family. Growing up the son of 
     a judge, Rob Horne always faced questions about a perceived 
     strict household.
       ``[My friends] thought that things were incredibly strict 
     and heavy handed in our house. They were not,'' he said. ``My 
     father had an amazing ability to leave the office, the 
     courthouse, behind. He never carried any of that baggage 
     home.''
       In addition to his dedication to youth sports, Horne is a 
     former Boy Scouts cub master, Loudoun County High School PTA 
     president and the first chairman of Loudoun County High 
     School's all-night, drug-free graduation organizing 
     committee.
       ``He has this selfless approach that he has taken 
     throughout his adult life in all facets of our community,'' 
     the younger Horne, now a teacher at Middleburg Academy, said. 
     ``It is this inexhaustible energy that he has. That is 
     something that I have really tried to draw from him. When you 
     undertake an endeavor, you really see it through. Be 
     passionate about what it is that you do, either 
     professionally or in some extracurricular activity.''
       Beyond the tangible work Horne does in Loudoun that will be 
     absent with his retirement, it is the intangible that will be 
     impossible to replace.
       ``I have dreaded 2013 for so long,'' Paice said. ``I have 
     always had a feeling that as long as he was in that 
     courthouse justice was going to be done, whether it was in 
     front of him or not. Divorce, criminal, land use, he was 
     going to be there to be sure that justice was done. And he is 
     not going to be there. It is totally an end of an era for 
     this community.''
       Duggan, who also worked for him as a law clerk one summer, 
     said one of the things Horne worked to instill in him was the 
     importance of people--something he tries to remember every 
     day he works as an attorney. Duggan said he has an 
     ``indelible mark'' on him of Horne placing his hands on his 
     shoulders and telling him:
       ``The law programs, the buildings they are all great, but 
     at the end of the day it is the people that really make the 
     system work . . . it doesn't matter if you don't have the 
     right people.''

                          ____________________