A 'TRUE WARRIOR' 'OF THE COURTROOM
Green Beret is well-respected public defender with several decades of experience
When Damian Horne meets new clients on docket days in the state’s District Court in Santa Fe, he smiles widely, drapes an arm around their shoulder and leans in conspiratorially, urging them to tell him their side of the story as if they were long-lost friends and not accused criminals wearing jumpsuits and shackles.
What must they think of him — with his easy air, mop of white hair and the red leash of his assistance dog, Sniper, fastened jauntily about his waist?
“People look at me, and they go, ‘Here’s an old blue-eyed gringo,’ ” the public defender said in a recent interview. “And sometimes I think people look at me and think, ‘Well, what the hell does he know about my problems?’ But I’m half-Spanish. I grew up on the west side, and it was a fight everyday.”
Little do Horne’s clients know that there is far more to this native Santa Fean, a former scrappy street fighter, than meets the eye.
He’s “a true warrior,” in the words of fellow public defender Brad Kerwin.
As a member of the U.S. Army Special Forces — better known as the Green Berets — with two tours of active duty under his belt and several decades as a public defender, Horne has been on the front lines as a constitutional soldier in the courtroom and on the battlefield for the better part of the past 40 years.
More importantly, where his clients are concerned, he’s a man who would fall on his own sword in defense of their constitutional rights.
In 2015, he did go to battle for a client’s rights, highlighting the
inadequacies of the state Law Offices of the Public Defender in a court motion seeking to get money he said the office needed to hire forensic accountants to help prepare for a felony fraud case.
Horne asked a judge to either dismiss the man’s charges, order the Public Defender’s Office to pay for the experts or require his bosses to show why they should not be found in contempt of court for failing to make good on a constitutional provision guaranteeing his client, determined to be an indigent defendant, adequate representation.
He not only got the money; Horne also shined a light on funding and workload problems in the Public Defender’s Office that have recently begun to reach critical levels.
He was placed on administrative leave following the public kerfuffle and feared he’d be fired.
But he fired back, filing a lawsuit accusing his bosses of retaliating against him for calling out their failures to provide “an ethically required defense” for his clients. That case is still pending. Fourteen months later, Horne sauntered back into the courthouse, still employed.
This time he was accompanied by Sniper the border collie, an assistance dog he said he was prescribed to allay symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder related to his military service.
Horne had enlisted in the Army right after college and served in Italy and Germany from 1978-82, and in the reserves until 1987.
Following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Horne said, he immediately tried to get back in the service.
After several years of trying to get deployed with the New Mexico National Guard, he joined a Special Forces unit in Colorado and was sent to Iraq from 2007-08 and to Afghanistan in 2013.
“Grandpa Rambo,” as he was nicknamed, saw combat in both places.
“I had it easy,” he said. “I came back with all my moving parts. My experience was no landing at Normandy. I wasn’t charging up Seminary Ridge on July 2, 1863. People weren’t being atomized next to me. But I came back with issues, as we all do, because people were trying to kill us, and we were trying to kill them.”
Despite being a self-described “combat-proven tough guy decorated for battle and all kinds of crap,” Horne cries easily, but only about important things.
He gets emotional talking about Sniper, who Horne said has been “a lifesaver.”
“A dog can cure many things Zoloft cannot,” he said.
“I can’t talk about my dogs or my kids or my flag without crying,” the father of two admitted in a recent interview.
The other thing that really gets him going is the U.S. Constitution, particularly the first three words: We the people.
“When I hear that, I’m brought to tears,” he said. “We the people, not some corporations, not some government, not some dictator or despot, not an army, not a political or social trend, but we the people. … It’s a celebration, it’s a declaration that commands rectitude. That demands that we behave in a way that removes us from barbarity and from tyranny.”
Horne takes his job seriously but executes it with grace and humor — for instance, cheekily suggesting a judge grant his client a bit of leeway “in honor of Bastille Day,” lacing his briefs with quotes from A Street Car Named Desire, charming colleagues on both sides of the bar.
Asked for one word to describe him, District Judge T. Glenn Ellington called Horne an “original.”
Private defense attorney Mike Jones described him as “funny” and “interesting.”
Prosecutor Todd Bullion, who regularly squares off against Horne in court, called him “loquacious” and “affable,” saying “everybody loves Damian.”
Even higher-ups at the Public Defender’s Office, with whom he’s still locked in a legal battle, described him in respectful terms.
District Defender Morgan Wood called him “unique.” Chief Public Defender Bennett Baur said Horne “has pride of country.”
Patriot, soldier, husband, father, scholar — when accused criminals get Horne assigned to their case, they are getting a lot more than just a lawyer.
Horne’s wife, Sydney West, a fellow public defender — described by some as the best defender in the district — has another word for him: “sexy.”