Henry Wade; Named in Roe vs. Wade, Tried Jack Ruby

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--he was the Wade in the landmark abortion ruling Roe vs. Wade and he prosecuted Jack Ruby--has died.

Wade died in Dallas on Thursday of complications from Parkinson’s disease, according to a spokesman for his law firm, Geary, Porter & Donovan. He was 86.

He was a law-and-order icon in Texas who never lost a case he prosecuted. He sought the death penalty 30 times and got it 29 times. His office reported conviction rates greater than 90%. Beleaguered defense attorneys banded together in a 7 Percent Club, an acknowledgment of their unimpressive record against the formidable Wade.

By his retirement in 1986, he had served longer than any other district attorney in a major U.S. city. He had plenty of critics, who said he was overzealous in his pursuit of convictions.

The son of a judge, Wade was a native of Rockwall, Texas, who earned his law degree from the University of Texas School of Law in 1938. He worked four years as an FBI agent, then served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He joined the Dallas County prosecutor’s office in 1947 and in 1950 was elected district attorney.

Declared Oswald Kennedy’s Killer

As chief prosecutor when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, Wade declared Lee Harvey Oswald the killer within 10 hours of the shooting. He was criticized for being too hasty in naming Oswald as the gunman, but years later maintained his belief that Oswald acted alone. “I wouldn’t have had any trouble convicting him,” he said.

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 slaying live. Wade led his prosecution.

The jury returned a guilty verdict in one hour and 50 minutes and sentenced Ruby 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. “No question he had some loose cells in his brain,” Wade told the New York Times many years later. However, he added, “I’m not inclined to feel sorry for any defendants in a trial.”

In 1970, Wade became the first named defendant in a lawsuit by a woman who had been denied an abortion. The Roe in the famous case was Norma McCorvey, a single, pregnant carnival worker in Dallas County whose lawsuit challenged the constitutionality of Texas’ 100-year-old ban on abortions except in cases where a woman’s life was in jeopardy.

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court cited the Constitution’s implied right to privacy in deciding that women had a right to decide about abortion in the first trimester.

Legal protocol called for Wade as top prosecutor to be named first in the suit, but he did not try the case himself. McCorvey finally met Wade in 1995, but told the Associated Press that she bore no resentment toward him.

“I never considered him as an enemy,” McCorvey said. “He was just doing his job.”

Wade was a folksy, cigar-chomping figure with an East Texas drawl whom Melvin Belli, Ruby’s defense lawyer, once belittled as “a country bumpkin.” He was fearless around those he considered his enemies, however, once labeling a judge on the state’s highest criminal court “a mental case” after the judge reversed some convictions won by Wade’s office.

After retiring from the district attorney’s office, Wade handled criminal cases for a prominent Dallas law firm, where he maintained a strict policy of heading home by 4 every afternoon to watch reruns of his favorite TV shows: “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza.”

Case Became Subject of Film

One of 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’ 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’ accuser basically confessed to the crime in the film, which was instrumental in winning Adams’ freedom in 1989.