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As to the many themes, I’ll let the book speak for itself, … the joy of a newborn child, the heartbreak of a lost career, medical mysteries, death, and stories of survival. But, the overriding theme throughout this book is the abuse of political power by elected officials.

Daniel Horne Holding multiple degrees, Daniel Horne, a business executive, husband, and father of two, is not your average violent felon. Horne’s memoir, Accidental Felons, tells the story of a family’s trauma after he was involved in a DUI automobile accident with no serious injury. Horne explains why, after being sentenced to three years’ probation, he spent one torturous year in the county’s Tent City jail. He exposes mismanagement, greed, and the abuse of power by Arizona’s elected officials. He hopes his experience will spread awareness of these abuses across the state and around the world. Horne holds a Master’s Degree in Finance, a Bachelor’s Degree in Business, and an Associate’s Degree in Engineering. He served as Chief Financial Officer for seven years with Inter-Coastal Electronics before health issues caused by his experience forced him to resign. He worked in the high-technology industry for 33 years and served honorably in the U.S. Navy. In addition to being a Vietnam Era veteran, he has lived in Tennessee, Virginia, Florida, Maryland, California, and Arizona. Daniel Horne is currently self-employed. He specializes in technology and government contract management. Besides writing, he enjoys painting and his family. He lives in Mesa, AZ with his wife and two young children. For more information, please visit: www.accidentalfelons.com. To schedule an interview with Daniel Horne or receive more information, please contact Elaine Krackau at elaine@prbythebook.com | 512.733.5145     Books-And-Authors.net: Where did you grow up and was reading and writing a part of your life? Who were your earliest influences? Daniel Horne: I grew up in the mountains and farmlands of East Tennessee a bit north of the Great Smoky Mountains. Bristol was the closest town, but I went to school in the country at the county’s public schools. I grew up working on farms for 50 cents an hour wages, dinner , and all the melons I could carry home. That’s the world that gave me my values. Reading was a big part of my life growing up. In high school, I worked in the library restocking the shelves and working in the periodical’s area. I loved reading fiction. The Hardy Boys, Sherlock Holmes, and Great Expectations were the books of the day when I went to school. I’d like to say that I read the works of Shakespeare or Hemingway, but it was mostly comic books. Superman, The Fantastic Four, and The X-men. One experience in junior college has always stuck with me because I viewed it as so odd at the time. My creative writing professor called me into her office and gave a tearful plea for me to leave the engineering curriculum and become a writer. I’ll never forget her words, “Your grammar is atrocious and your writing is pompous, but those things can be fixed. You have a wonderful gift and you need to share it.” At the time, I thought she was an overly dramatic and a bit crazy college professor. I guess time will tell. I do know that the writing floods out of me when I’m on a creative roll. It’s like I’ll become sick if I don’t get the words out into the real world—it’s physical as well as emotional.     Books-And-Authors.net: Briefly discuss your new book, ACCIDENTAL FELONS. Why did you write this book? You write in the Preface that ACCIDENTAL FELONS contains many themes – Explain? Daniel Horne: As to the many themes, I’ll let the book speak for itself, … the joy of a newborn child, the heartbreak of a lost career, medical mysteries, death, and stories of survival. But, the overriding theme throughout this book is the abuse of political power by elected officials. This book paints a truer picture of reality than those who profit from the criminal justice system have painted. They have caricatured these men and women into something less than human. I see sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers. I see people more in need of love and a helping hand than need yet another hard slap in the face. The sheriff stumps about Playboy magazines, they are there, but I saw more people read the Bible than a Playboy. Of course, there are people I agree should be there, but that’s a fraction of the 10,000 people who are incarcerated. This experience has transformed me, now I’ve witnessed the reality, and it is a long way from the staged show of sound bites politicians and TV anchors perform to nudge our anger, or scare us, in an effort to get our vote or ratings.   Books-And-Authors.net:  Describe your title ACCIDENTAL FELONS as it relates to the book. Daniel Horne: The book has another theme flowing through it, the theme of family. My wife went through an ordeal unlike anything she has ever faced.(the photo in the webpage header is my family) It was horrific. Knowing me, knowing these men were trying to crush me. Knowing how wrong it was, that there was nothing she could do, and that no one wanted to hear our side of the story. And then there were the children. How would she raise them if I were sentenced to ten years in prison? God Bless her for loving me so much! The accidental felons are the families of those who cross paths with the government in this hard-hearted society we’ve created. I chose the book’s title for them.     Books-And-Authors.net: Explain why you blacked-out before the accident. Daniel Horne: I had passed out under mysterious circumstances 4 times back in the late 1990s. Alcohol was not involved in any of these occurrences. The book gives the details, but the bottom line is that the doctors never found an adequate explanation other than exhaustion from so many years of going to night school and working long hours of overtime. A doctor ordered me to rest, and I spent three months on disability leave. The mysterious malady vanished while I was on disability leave. Not long after that, I decided to retire and continue my recovery, so I moved to Sedona, Arizona. That’s where I met my wife, Becky. A few months after Becky had our 2nd child, I stopped at a sports bar one afternoon after work to get something to eat because I was severely hypoglycemic and needed some food. I ordered a beer and hot wings, and the next thing I knew I had caused a car accident. It turns out I was in the bar for 6 hours, had 6 beers, and then drove home. We later discovered that it was these same 2 medical conditions that reappeared and affected my ability to know where I was or what I was doing. One of them created a situation where my body wasn’t metabolizing the alcohol normally.  The other, triggered by the first, is why I lost control of the truck in a swoon of semi-consciousness.     Books-And-Authors.net: In ACCIDENTAL FELONS one of the themes you mention is “abuse of political power by elected officials” – Explain in more detail. Daniel Horne: Rather than charging me with some sort of DUI related offense as one would expect, the county attorney indicted me for Aggravated Assault, a Class 3 Violent Felony ( by comparison, Class 1 is murder, Class 2 is child molestation and arson). That crime is used for people who intentionally shoot, stab, or otherwise purposefully and seriously injure someone else. In my situation there were no life-threatening injuries and the accident certainly wasn’t on-purpose. As he well knew, Arizona has made that crime a mandatory minimum sentencing statute. In the ultra-conservative political climate here, I would be able to present the facts to a jury only at the risk of receiving ten mandatory, and potentially thirty, years in prison. He held a gun to my head, spun the cylinder, and double dared me to pull the trigger, so to speak, knowing that the judge would be helpless to judge me fairly if a jury had doubted my attorney’s presentation of the facts because of better lawyering by the other side. What husband or father is going to put his career ahead of his family? I made the choice that caused the least pain to the people I love. Mandatory minimum sentencing as a concept was passed into law with the specific intent of getting long-term, hardened, career criminals off the street. It was neverintended to be used against the masses of the population as it is being used today. Certainly, it was never intended for a first offense DUI of any sort. Of the 10,000 incarcerated residents, 7,000 of the people in the sheriff’s jail have not been convicted, and some have not even been charged, with a crime. Yet their lives are at risk while they are incarcerated there. I found the jail’s environment far more hazardous to prisoners than other prisoners, abuse by guards, sleep deprivation and 2,500 calories of garbage is inhumane and at times it’s torture. To elect a politician who brags about doing these things to fellow Americans is despicable. I call that an abuse of power. The sheriff compares our soldiers in Iraq to life of prisoners in the tents, telling the media how hard it is for the soldiers. That’s a compelling analogy. But, he should know that soldiers aren’t fed garbage, they don’t live in dry-rotted tents encased in metal frames that make a convection oven in the summer and a freezer in the winter. Soldiers are given warm clothing and receive top-shelf medical attention. Soldiers are not treated psychologically as if they are scum who should die and be urinated upon. That is, unless they are captured and put into a POW camp. The commander of a POW camp does treat enemy combatants with the contempt that prisoners in Tent City are treated. I call an American politician treating American citizens like that an abuse of power.     Books-And-Authors.net:  Has there been positive or negative reactions locally to ACCIDENTAL FELONS? Are you concerned at all of the negatives—by any of those mentioned in the book? Daniel Horne: It would be foolish to say my family and I are not concerned. These men are dangerous and, so far, they have the sanction of the media and voters. It’s scary to stand in opposition to a gun with a pen and a piece of paper, I’ll admit that. On the other hand, I’m telling my story as it happened, and these two men take a great deal of pride in acting out the behaviors I believe are so atrocious. We’ll have to see. Understand that the book is not a diatribe of “Woe Is Me, I was wronged.” Life happens to us and I accept what’s happened to me. What I don’t accept is the thousands of other people in Maricopa County (the millions across the nation) who are being abused. And, I don’t accept the idea that people are basically bad and deserve to be treated like vermin. That’s why the book leaves me behind and tells the story of so many other people. It’s intended to give an accurate and vivid representation of the realities in that jail. With this many Americans under penal control, the word felony is a cliché and that’s not just misleading, it’s wrong.     Books-And-Authors.net:  If you could be an elected official for 1 year – What would you do to improve the prison system in your area and why? Daniel Horne: The first thing I would do is to stop the profiteering. Governments and special interest groups siphon off billions of dollars from millions of Americans. That’s not justice, that’s a harvest! One of the most powerful drivers of this travesty is the economics that fuel it. It’s a current of money flowing out of millions of checking accounts into a few thousand checking accounts. That’s really about all it would take. You remove the profit incentive and everything else will rapidly unwind back to some level of sanity. The problem left to solve will be the problem that’s being hidden by these political diversions — supplying enough jobs for the population without throwing our people into the bowels of the economy’s engine.     Books-And-Authors.net: How did the experiences you write in ACCIDENTAL FELONS change you as father, husband, neighbor, and human being? Daniel Horne: My life has had its tests to be sure. Some began almost right out of the womb and I talk about them in the book. I’ve always been a sensitive person, thanks to my mother’s influence, but it hasn’t always shown. Women have always seen more in me than I saw in myself. I think it took watching the birth of my first daughter to bring me to my senses. I cried with joy for two days. What a blessing! If I were waxing metaphysical about this, I would say that this was a final exam of some sort to see what my metal is truly made of. I’ve never had my confidence in everything I hold dear shaken like it was shaken by this experience. I tell everyone in my family I love them a minimum of once each day. Every day we all drive to work, but some of us don’t always make it home.     Books-And-Authors.net:  In ACCIDENTAL FELONS you tell others stories that are hard to believe, like the 15-year-old boy who almost spent 90 years in prison for possession of a Playboy magazine – For you, what was the hardest story to believe. Daniel Horne: Well, the 15 year old’s story isn’t quite like that. He was facing 90 years in prison because the county attorney accused him of looking at child porn on his computer. Based on a tip from YAHOO they SWAT teamed his parent’s home at three in the morning to capture the offending PC by surprise. They ultimately reduced the charges due to lack of any true evidence, but scared the family half out of their wits (flushing out all their home’s equity) in the process. Rather than drop the charges completely, they had the boy agree to plead guilty to a lower sexual felony of showing a Playboy magazine to two other teenagers his age in high school. This story is difficult to believe to be sure, that’s why I footnote it in the Preface so readers can go to the ABC’s 20/20 interview and read about it there as well. Hardest story to believe? There are a couple of stories that were difficult to listen to because they were so tragic. The man whose five-year-old daughter had kidney cancer and whose wife couldn’t speak English well enough to get the Medicaid to pay for the surgery to remove her kidney was heart wrenching because his public defender was ignoring him and he couldn’t get through to the judge. Then there’s the story of the man whose two-year-old daughter was run over by her mother and almost killed. That little girl needed both her parents, but her father was bunked above me in the tents — another wrongfully charged felon. He was so distraught that I worried that he might commit suicide. Maybe one day he’ll read my book and give me a call. I still ask about him.   Books-And-Authors.net: What was the last book you read? Daniel Horne: Bad Money by Kevin Phillips (an investigative reporter). A good read to understand the why’s of the current economic collapse, when it began (roughly 1980) and what to look for now. Some other books I would recommend are: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (Pulitzer Prize winning book). A great read on civilizations, why they prosper, and why they collapse. Also shows many symptoms of a societies impending doom as seen from an archaeological perspective. Running on Empty by Peter Peterson (Former head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank) A good read on the coming banking collapse and the predictive collapse of the economy. The Perpetual Prisoner Machine by Joel Dyer (an investigative reporter) A good read for understanding the effect of television and profit on why we have hardened our hearts. On the lighter side, I’ve read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and both of Eckhart Tolle’s books.     Books-And-Authors.net: What’s next? Daniel Horne: I’ve got a couple of projects I’m working on. One is rewriting my non-fiction book titled Political Fictions and adding it to the website in chapters. The other is a novel I’ve drafted and now I’m in the first serious edit. The first has approximately an 80K word length and the second 120K.     Books-And-Authors.net: Do you have any hobbies? What are they? How do they enhance your writing? Daniel Horne: Before this happened I had started woodworking. It’s why I bought the truck. Now the equipment just gathers dust. Knowing what I know and seeing what I saw was transformational. All I’m interested in these days is writing. My family would love it if I took the time to have a hobby again. When you’ve seen the beast up close and personal, smelled its breath, and felt the fear like I have — how can you play? I write!

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