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Watching Atticus Finch, the defense attorney who represents an innocent man in the movie "To Kill a Mockingbird," made a college-age Creighton Horton think he'd like to be a lawyer.

"It was the idea of fighting for justice, being involved in work that was meaningful," he said.

Horton would become a prosecutor, working on some of Utah's highest-profile homicide cases in the Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office and Utah Attorney General's Office. He retired this month after 31 years.

After Horton started with the district attorney's office in 1978, the his first major murder case was that of Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist who killed two black teenagers with a high-powered rifle because they were jogging with two white girls.

Franklin was convicted of first-degree murder and the jury sentenced him to life in prison. That was in the early 1980s, when state law provided two options for the sentencing of the worst criminals: death or life in prison with a possibility of parole, which provided a chance they could be released.

That case, and others, convinced him that Utah jurors and judges needed another option: life without parole.

"There needed to be an alternative for people who committed the most serious crimes, for people who didn't get the death penalty, that would ensure they would never be released from prison," he said.

The law, supported by Horton, passed in 1992. Over the years, he would often testify in front of the Utah Legislature as they considered changes to Utah's criminal homicide laws.

Horton moved to the Utah Attorney General's office in fall 1987, and soon after helped prosecute Addam Swapp, a fundamentalist Mormon who blew up an LDS church, sparking a 13-day standoff that ended in the death of a Utah Corrections officer.

"It was very intense," he said. The trial ended in a federal prison sentence for the church bombing and a state manslaughter conviction.

A few years later, Horton became head of attorney general's newly created criminal division, where he stayed for 17 years. He also assisted with murder prosecutions in smaller counties, most recently the case of Carole Alden, who was convicted in 2006 of killing her husband in Millard County.

He also supported a bill to compensate people who have been wrongly convicted. A prosecutor's job, he said, is as much about protecting the innocent as convicting the guilty.

"It's an interesting position to be in, always thinking, 'What do I think is the right thing to do?' " he said.

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