Henry Menasco Wade (November 11, 1914—March 1, 2001), was a Texas lawyer who participated in two of the most 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's decision legalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade. In addition, Wade was District Attorney when Randall Dale Adams, the subject of the documentary film The Thin Blue Line, was convicted in the murder of Robert Wood, a Dallas police officer.
Wade, one of eleven children, was born in Rockwall County, Texas, outside Dallas. A good student, Wade, along with five of his seven brothers, entered the legal profession. Shortly after graduating from the University of Texas, in 1939, Wade joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation, then headed by the towering figure of J. Edgar Hoover. Wade's assignment as Special Agent was to investigate espionage cases along the East Coast of the United States and in South America. During World War II, Wade served in the U.S. Navy, taking part in the invasions of the Philippines and Okinawa.
Contents |
Wade and the Kennedy Assassination
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 only four years later, a position he would hold for thirty-six years straight, from 1951 until his voluntary retirement in 1987. In the early afternoon hours of November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in downtown Dallas, just blocks from Wade's headquarters in the Dallas County Courthouse. Wade recounted that Cliff Carter, a member of newly sworn-in President Lyndon B. Johnson's staff, telephoned him three times that night. According to Wade, Johnson wanted any evidence of a potential conspiracy suppressed, lest the stability of the nation or its foreign relations be put in jeopardy. Wade asserted that Johnson essentially ordered him to "charge Oswald with plain murder." In point of fact, that was actually the only available option, because in 1963 there was no federal law concerning assassination of the president unless it occurred on federal property or the District of Columbia: technically, the JFK assassination was a conventional murder case over which only the State of Texas held jurisdiction.
Wade lost the opportunity to try Lee Harvey Oswald for JFK's murder when Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot the suspect just two days later. Nonetheless, Wade became nationally recognized for prosecuting Ruby himself for Oswald's murder. In that celebrated trial, Wade went head-to-head against the famed San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli. Legend has it that Wade, in an effort to ridicule his opponent and possibly to play to anti-ethnic prejudices, deliberately mispronounced Belli's name as "Belly". When Belli politely corrected Wade, the latter acquiesced; a short time later, Wade moved that the court adjourn for the lunch hour so that he and his staff could have some "spaghet-tye." Ruby, for his part, died while waiting for an appeal; he claimed that various entities were trying to poison him.
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 with the exception to save the life of the mother. Norma McCorvey ("Jane Roe"), a single woman who has since recanted the claim that her pregnancy was the result of rape, was signed up as the representative plantiff. The challenge sought 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. Consequently, both side cross-appealed. The case worked its way through the appellate process, culminating in the Supreme Court's landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which made abortion legal in the United States. Until that decision, Wade had never lost a case.
Randall Dale Adams
Wade once again gained national attention in 1988 with the release of the Errol Morris’s documentary film The Thin Blue Line. Randall Dale Adams was convicted in 1977 and sentenced to death for the murder of Robert Wood, a Dallas police officer. The execution was scheduled for May 8, 1979 but U.S. 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.
Later life
Despite the loss of the Roe case — and the unpopularity of the results with many conservative Texas voters — Wade himself was not blamed, and his political career did not suffer. He continued to serve in office for an additional fourteen years, and afterwards 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 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.
