Henry M. Wade, the legendary Texas prosecutor whose 36-year tenure as Dallas County District Attorney placed him in the national spotlight during two historic moments, died on March 1st aged 86. He was the Wade in the landmark abortion ruling Roe v Wade and he led the prosecution of Jack Ruby for murdering President John F. Kennedy's alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
He was district attorney from 1951 to 1987, and during the early years often prosecuted cases himself. When he did, he never lost a single one. He asked for death sentences on 30 occasions, and got them on 29. His office reported conviction rates greater than 90 per cent. Beleaguered defence attorneys banded together to found the Seven Per Cent Club, an acknowledgment of their unimpressive record against the formidable attorney.
The son of a judge, Henry Wade was a native of Rockwall, Texas. He was educated locally until, as the Depression hit America, he began studying law in the state capital, Austin. He showed formidable academic talent and graduated with the highest legal honours from the University of Texas in 1938.
In 1939, he became an FBI special agent. Over the next four years, he was assigned to investigations in Boston, New York, Baltimore and Washington. He became sufficiently well-regarded by J. Edgar Hoover to be dispatched on a covert operation in Ecuador, where he posed as a radio journalist.
He joined the US navy in 1943, returning to his legal work at the end of the war. For three years, he served as an (appointed) assistant district attorney in Dallas. Then, in 1950, he won his first election to the senior job. The average span for Dallas district attorneys is six years; Henry Wade was reelected nine times, to hold the office continuously for 36 years.
As chief prosecutor when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963, Henry Wade declared Oswald the killer within 10 hours of the shooting. He was criticised for being too hasty in naming Oswald as the gunman, but years later maintained his belief that Oswald had acted alone.
Two days after the assassination, Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, gunned down Oswald at point-blank range in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters while news cameras captured the killing live.
Henry Wade led the prosecution of Ruby. The jury returned a guilty verdict in one hour and 50 minutes and sentenced him to death. But the conviction was overturned in 1966 by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which said it was wrong to have held the trial in Dallas because of the intensity of feelings there over the assassination. Ruby died of cancer in 1967 while awaiting a second trial.
At times Henry Wade acted almost like a Hollywood caricature. He loved playing the country hick to out-of-state opponents, chewing on a huge cigar and laying on a thick East Texas accent. However, there was a razor-sharp brain behind this facade.
During the Ruby trial, he constantly riled defence counsel Melvin Belli by rhyming his name with Delhi. When the judge eventually ordered him to address his opponent correctly as, "Bell-eye", the DA responded: "Well, your honour, I accept the reprimand and, just to show I am in good faith, I'll be glad to invite Mr Bell-eye to lunch on some spaghett-eye."
In 1970, he became the first named defendant in a lawsuit by a local waitress who had been denied an abortion. Legal protocol called for Henry Wade as top prosecutor to be named first in the suit, although he did not try the case.
Norma McCorvey, a single, pregnant carnival worker in Dallas County challenged the constitutionality of Texas's 100year-old ban on abortions except in cases where a woman's life was in jeopardy. The multiple appeals in the case (with the waitress still identified only as Jane Roe) eventually reached the US Supreme Court.
On January 22nd, 1973, Justice Harry Blackmun delivered the verdict which put Roe v Wade forever in the history books. With six of his nine colleagues, he held that the personal freedoms defined by the 14th amendment included a woman's right to an abortion.
The decision has bedevilled American politics ever since. The most recent example of its continuing impact was President George Bush's first executive order in office, to deny American aid to nations permitting abortions.
One of Henry Wade's most controversial cases involved Randall Dale Adams, who was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1977 for the murder of a Dallas police officer. Adams's case became the subject of The Thin Blue Line, a 1988 documentary that won acclaim as a powerful indictment of the Texas justice system. Adams's accuser basically confessed to the crime in the film, which was instrumental in winning his freedom in 1989.
Henry Menasco Wade: born 1914; died, March 2001