Henry Wade

Henry Wade
Dallas County District Attorney
In office 1951 – January 1988
Preceded by	Will Wilson
Succeeded by	John Vance
Personal details
Born	Henry Menasco Wade[1] (1914-11-11)November 11, 1914 Rockwall County, Texas, U.S.
Died	March 1, 2001(2001-03-01) (aged 86)[1] Dallas, Texas, U.S.
Political party	Democratic
Alma mater	University of Texas[2]
Occupation	Lawyer
Known for	Prosecution of Jack Ruby Roe v. Wade

Henry Menasco Wade (November 11, 1914 – March 1, 2001) was an American lawyer who served as district attorney of Dallas County from 1951 to 1987. He participated in two notable U.S. court cases of the 20th century: the prosecution of Jack Ruby for killing Lee Harvey Oswald, and the U.S. Supreme Court case that held abortion was a constitutional right, Roe v. Wade. In addition, Wade was district attorney when Randall Dale Adams, the subject of the 1988 documentary film The Thin Blue Line, was wrongfully convicted in the murder of Robert Wood, a Dallas police officer.

Early life

Wade, one of 11 children,^[2] was born in Rockwall County, Texas, outside Dallas. Wade, along with five of his seven brothers, entered the legal profession. Shortly after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin, in 1939, Wade joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation,^[1] headed by J. Edgar Hoover. Wade's assignment as special agent was to investigate espionage cases along the US East Coast and in South America. Wade served in the US Navy during World War II, participating in the invasions of the Philippines and Okinawa.

Career

He was first elected Rockwall County Attorney. In 1947, Wade joined the Dallas County District Attorney's Office. He won election to the top job four years later, a position he held for 36 years, until his retirement in 1987.

John Kennedy assassination

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in downtown Dallas, just blocks from Wade's office in the Dallas County Courthouse.^[3]

Wade lost the opportunity to try Lee Harvey Oswald for the killing of Kennedy and the murder of Officer J.D. Tippit when Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby murdered Oswald two days later; he became known nationally for prosecuting Ruby for Oswald's murder. Wade closely supervised the Ruby trial, but he appointed his assistant, William Alexander, to conduct the courtroom proceedings.^[4]

Wade and Alexander confronted Ruby's lawyers, famed trial lawyer Melvin Belli and Texas counsellor Joe Tonahill, in a lengthy trial that concluded on March 14, 1964, with a verdict for Ruby of "guilty of murder with malice." The jury had deliberated for less than three hours before arriving at its decision, and it recommended a death penalty.^[5]

In a January 1964 Dallas Times Herald, Wade's wife was quoted: "I’d be afraid to drink a glass of light wine and then drive to the drugstore...If the police stopped me, I know what Henry would do."^[6]

Roe v. Wade

Wade, as Dallas County district attorney, was the named defendant when attorneys Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee mounted a 1970 constitutional challenge to the Texas criminal statutes prohibiting doctors from performing abortions. Norma McCorvey ("Jane Roe"), a single woman, was signed up as the representative plaintiff. The challenge sought both a declaratory judgment that the Texas criminal abortion statutes were unconstitutional on their face, and an injunction restraining the defendant from enforcing the statutes. The lower court refused to grant Roe's desired injunction, but declared the criminal abortion statutes were void.

Both sides cross-appealed. The case worked its way through the appellate process, culminating in the Supreme Court's landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that made all first trimester abortions legal throughout the United States.

Later life

Despite the loss of Roe v. Wade and its unpopularity with conservative voters, Wade himself was not blamed, and his political career did not suffer. He continued to serve in office for an additional 14 years, and he remained a fixture around the new Crowley Courts Building, where members of the Dallas Bar called him "the Chief". In 1995, the Henry Wade Juvenile Justice Center was named in his honor, and in 2000, shortly before his death from Parkinson's disease, Texas Lawyer magazine named him as one of the 102 most influential lawyers of the 20th century.^[2]

Legacy

Wade once again gained national attention in 1988 with the release of Errol Morris's documentary film The Thin Blue Line. The documentary tells the story of Randall Dale Adams' 1977 conviction for the murder of Robert Wood, a Dallas police officer. Adams was sentenced to death for the crime. The execution was scheduled for May 8, 1979, but US Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., ordered a stay only three days before the scheduled date. Instead of conducting a new trial, Governor Bill Clements commuted Adams's sentence to life in prison. Adams was exonerated in 1988, after serving 12 years in prison. Similar cases of exonerated men have recently arisen, putting the legality of Wade's practices in question.

As of July 2008, 15 persons convicted during Wade's term as Dallas County district attorney have been exonerated of the crimes of which they were convicted in light of new DNA evidence. Because of the culture of the department to "convict at all costs," more innocent people are suspected to have been falsely imprisoned.^[7] Project Innocence Texas has more than 250 cases under examination.

Several articles later noted that a 1963 internal memo in Wade's office advised against "Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans or a member of any minority race" from serving on a jury.^[8] In 1969, Jon Sparling, one of Wade's top assistants, wrote a training manual warning against picking, among others, "free-thinkers" and "extremely overweight people," and said, "You are not looking for a fair juror but rather a strong, biased and sometimes hypocritical individual who believes that defendants are different from them."^[9]

Craig Watkins, the first black American DA for Dallas Country, described Wade's tenure as having "a cowboy kind of mentality and the reality is that kind of approach is archaic, racist, elitist and arrogant."^[10] In Wade’s final year in office, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of a black man, Thomas Miller-El, ruling that blacks were excluded from the jury. Cited in Miller-El’s appeal was a manual for prosecutors that Wade wrote in 1969 and was used for more than a decade. It gave instructions on how to keep minorities off juries. Before Wade's death, DNA evidence was used for the first time to reverse a Dallas County conviction; David Shawn Pope, found guilty of rape in 1986, who had spent 15 years in prison.^[11] Watkins said in a 2010 interview in The Guardian that officers from his own jurisdiction "were taken aback because we were calling in to question the work they had done for all these years. It was the same among some folks in this office. They were afraid of the consequences of this Pandora's box being opened."^[12] Lenell Geter, a black engineer, was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to life in prison. After Geter had spent more than a year behind bars, Wade agreed to a new trial, then dropped the charges in 1983 amid reports of shoddy evidence and allegations Geter was singled out because of his race.^[13] According to a 2016, article, Wade was responsible for the conviction and execution of a black man called Tommy Lee Walker. Former Dallas assistant district attorney Edward Gray wrote the 2010 book Henry Wade's Tough Justice which discussed the miscarriages of justice during Wade's tenure, noting that Wade's office conviction rate of innocent defendants was ten times the national average. Gray stated that "Henry Wade wouldn't intentionally try to convict someone he knew to be innocent...but even in cases where evidence was weak, he would go all out, go for broke, be super-competitive."^[14]

References

External links

• Wolfgang Saxon (March 2, 2001). "Henry Wade, Prosecutor in National Spotlight, Dies at 86". The New York Times. Retrieved May 11, 2008.
• Henry Wade at Find a Grave