Thursday, October 23, 2003
Page 3
Orange County Jurist Named to Judicial Performance Commission
By a MetNews Staff Writer
The state Supreme Court yesterday named Orange Superior Court Presiding Judge Frederick P. Horn to the Commission on Judicial Performance.
Horn, 60, will be one of two trial jurists on the commission. He succeeds Madeleine Flier, who had to leave the commission upon her recent elevation from the Los Angeles Superior Court to this district’s Court of Appeal.
The 11-member commission includes six public members—two each appointed by the governor, the Senate Rules Committee, and the speaker of the Assembly—plus one appellate jurist and two trial judges named by the Supreme Court and two attorneys named by the governor.
Horn will serve the remainder of Flier’s term, which expires Feb. 28, 2005. He would then be eligible to serve up to two full, four-year terms.
The commission is scheduled to meet Monday and Tuesday in San Francisco.
Horn was a Los Angeles deputy district attorney from 1974 to 1991, after having served as a district attorney investigator from 1971 to 1974. Then-Gov. George Deukmejian appointed him to the Orange County Harbor Municipal Court in 1990, and he was serving as the assistant presiding judge of that court when then-Gov. Pete Wilson elevated him to the Orange Superior Court in 1993.
A Minnesota native, Horn grew up in Lompoc and joined the city’s police department in 1963. He earned an associate’s degree from Hancock College in 1964.
He joined the Santa Monica Police Department in 1965, then joined the Army in 1967 and was assigned to the Criminal Investigations Division in Washington, D.C. He returned to Santa Monica in 1969 and was promoted to sergeant before being hired by the District Attorney’s Office.
He earned undergraduate and law degrees from the University of West Los Angeles before becoming a deputy district attorney. His assignments as a prosecutor included hard-core gang crimes and crimes against police officers.
Copyright 2003, Metropolitan News Company