A Shameful Legacy

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Wade and his cronies share a shameful legacy.













Wade, as a symbolic force and active agent, straddles both the disciplining of women’s bodies through law and medicine and the brutalization of a criminalized underclass, largely delineated along racial lines, through the prison industrial complex. Wade’s surname, depersonalized, is now a metonym for patriarchy, but the association ought to extend to mass incarceration and white supremacy as well.




—From the Exhibit “Cottage Industry” by Mary Walling Blackburn and Rafael Kelman, The Booklyn Art Gallery, Brooklyn, New York (November 13–December 29, 2015).
A tantalizing glimpse at Henry Wade has found its way into an exhibit in a Brooklyn art gallery. But who was he? We know that “Jane Roe” in the Roe v. Wade class-action lawsuit filed by attorneys Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee was Norma McCorvey, a young, down-and-out Dallas waitress who couldn’t get an abortion and in fact never got an abortion because the lawsuit dragged on until terminating the pregnancy was no longer a possibility. She later became an anti-abortion activist, and in 2003 she sued the Dallas district attorney in a futile attempt to overturn Roe. v. Wade, claiming that she didn’t understand what an abortion was when she signed on as a plaintiff in 1969.
Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade was an accidental defendant. If Coffee and Weddington had found a client in El Paso or Houston, Henry Wade wouldn’t be “Wade.” He didn’t even argue the Supreme Court case that made him a symbol of “the disciplining of women’s bodies through law.” The landmark lawsuit wrote him into the wrong historical narrative.




Wade made his name as a prosecutor. He holds the record for the highest felony conviction rate (92 percent) in a state that perennially ranks in the top five in percentage of residents incarcerated.
He was better than 92 percent. Early in his career, when he was prosecuting cases himself, he had a 100 percent conviction rate.


In capital cases, he asked for death sentences 30 times and sent 29 men to death row.


In 1969 he wrote a prosecutors’ manual that ensured that blacks in Dallas County were almost always excluded from criminal juries. The manual was cited in a 2004 Supreme Court decision that a granted a retrial to African-American defendant Thomas Miller-El, because one of Wade’s assistant district attorneys had excluded 10 of 11 African-Americans in the jury pool from the jury that convicted Miller-El of capital murder and sentenced him to death. 


In 2006, Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins, the first African-American ever elected to the office, began a systematic examination of Wade’s convictions. By 2008, Watkins’s investigation overturned the convictions of 19 men sent to prison by Wade’s office, three for murder and 16 for either rape or robbery. Ten of the men released are black.
After Watkins’s defeat by a Republican challenger in 2014, the Innocence Project of Texas continues to investigate false convictions. Five of nine men cleared by the Innocence Project were African-Americans wrongly convicted by Wade’s staff; one 2 was serving a life sentence for murder, three were serving life 2 sentences for sexual assault, the fourth had been sentenced to 99 years for sexual assault.


With 24 DNA exonerations, Dallas County has far surpassed all other counties in Texas in overturned convictions. The current Dallas District Attorney, Susan Hawk, a part of a concerted b Republican campaign to oust Watkins, has not pursued her predecessor’s examination of questionable convictions. 


Wade died in 2001. The Henry Wade Juvenile Justice Center memorializes him in the city where he made his name putting men behind bars.




Sources: The Sentencing Project; The Texas Innocence Project; The Dallas Morning News; McCorvey v. Hill (U.S. Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, September, 2004.)

Officially, law enforcement has said the false convictions were tragic aberrations. No one has been charged with lying or disciplined for incompetence or negligence in connection with the DNA exonerations.

An eight-month review by The News of previously closed prosecution files found, however, that the faulty identifications were the predictable consequences of a criminal justice system that ignored safeguards meant to protect the innocent. The files reveal a law-and-order machine that focused on securing and bolstering eyewitness testimony, regardless of the victim's doubt or the lack of corroborating evidence.

Six years after his DNA exoneration, Wiley Fountain is free but homeless, saving cans to survive on the streets of South Dallas. In 1986, Mr. Fountain fell victim to a false rape conviction as a result of a flawed photo lineup. 

That may be starting to change. In January 2007, Craig Watkins became the state's first elected black district attorney and quickly focused on wrongful convictions. The issue resonated with the former defense lawyer. He was also the first district attorney in memory with no ties to the prosecutor's office and has shown he is not afraid to re-examine its past.

So earlier this year, Mr. Watkins granted a request from The News to review prosecution files to analyze the root causes of the wrongful convictions. Reporters also consulted more than 70 current and former prosecutors and police officers, defense lawyers, judges, jurors and exonerees, as well as legal scholars and those who pursue wrongful conviction cases.

In addition to an almost slavish reliance on eyewitness testimony, a review of the Dallas County DNA cases showed that:

• Thirteen of the 19 wrongly convicted men were black. Eight of the 13 were misidentified by victims of another race. Police investigators and prosecutors in the cases were all white, as were many of the juries of the 1980s.

• Police officers used suggestive lineup procedures, sometimes pressured victims to pick their suspect and then cleared the case once an identification was made.

• Prosecutors frequently went to trial with single-witness identifications and flimsy corroboration. Some tried to preserve shaky identifications by withholding evidence that pointed to other potential suspects.

• Judges, governed by case law that has not kept pace with developments in DNA testing or research on eyewitness testimony, routinely approved even tainted pretrial identifications as long as an eyewitness expressed certainty in court.

Great stuff Mick!
Cheers, Ed

Dont doubt the power of a documentary film

Quite so Ed.

Kennedy Assassination Figure. The long time Dallas County District attorney, he was the chief prosecutor in the trial of Jack Ruby, killer of President John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. While a student at the University of Texas, he campaigned for Lyndon Baines Johnson in his 1937 bid for the United States House of Representatives. After graduating from the Law School of the University of Texas in Austin, in 1939 he became special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigations and investigated espionage cases for four years on the East Coast and in South America. He served in the United States Navy during World War II and took part in the invasions of the Philippines and Okinawa while stationed on the aircraft carriers "USS Enterprise" and "USS Hornet". In 1947, Wade joined the Dallas County District Attorney's Office and rose to chief felony prosecutor. In 1950, he was elected criminal District Attorney of Dallas County, a position he held for over 36 years, longer than any other large city district attorney in the country. He was known as the "Chief'' to over 900 assistant district attorneys during his term. In 1964 the role of chief prosecutor in the trial of Jack Ruby fell to him, and he later testified before the Warren Commission, the Congressional investigation into the Kennedy assassination. In 1970, he announced the appeal of a ruling that found that Texas' abortion law was unconstitutional, which led to the landmark 1973 United States Supreme Court ruling "Roe verses Wade".

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/21589/henry-menasco-wade

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/myers-dale-with-malice-lee-harvey-oswald-and-the-murder-of-officer-j-d-tippit

J McBride:




Myers does not discuss Wade's curious claim in his testimony that Captain Will Fritz, the DPD's lead homicide detective, told him about the palmprint evidence in their meeting shortly after 7 p.m. on November 22, which, if true, could be proof that the police were planning or expecting to use fabricated evidence against Oswald. The Warren Report claims Day lifted the palmprint on the night of November 22, but he did not release it to the FBI until November 26, and it did not arrive at the FBI Laboratory until November 29. Neither Captain Fritz nor DPD Chief Jesse Curry mentioned this supposedly crucial piece of evidence to the media on the assassination weekend. 




As Sylvia Meagher writes, "Oddly enough, the first public mention of Oswald's palmprint on the rifle came from District Attorney Henry Wade at his Sunday night press conference (of which Mark Lane has said that Wade was not guilty of a single accuracy)." I discuss in Into the Nightmare the possibility that the FBI obtained the palmprint on Sunday night or Monday morning at the Fort Worth funeral home where Oswald's body was being prepared for burial.





With his testimony more than six months later, Wade contradicted his own claim to surprised reporters on November 24 that an Oswald palmprint had been found, and in a considerable understatement, admitted about that news conference, "I was a little inaccurate in one or two things but it was because of the communications with the police ... I ran through just what I knew, which probably was worse than nothing." Wade also told the commission that at his earlier news conference shortly after midnight on November 23, following his briefing by the police on the so-called evidence, "I was the one who was answering the questions about things I didn't know much about, to tell you the truth."

Mick Purdy wrote:As Sylvia Meagher writes, "Oddly enough, the first public mention of Oswald's palmprint on the rifle came from District Attorney Henry Wade at his Sunday night press conference (of which Mark Lane has said that Wade was not guilty of a single accuracy)." 

Just as the Truly-Police encounter that occurred on the first floor then later evolved to be on the second floor, the non-existent palm print later shows up. Lying sons-a-bitches.

[Eat shit, Von Pein. You know better, you filthy rotten apologist.]

Mick Purdy wrote:With his testimony more than six months later, Wade contradicted his own claim to surprised reporters on November 24 that an Oswald palmprint had been found, and in a considerable understatement, admitted about that news conference, "I was a little inaccurate in one or two things but it was because of the communications with the police ... I ran through just what I knew, which probably was worse than nothing."

No "probably" about it, "Mr. Nothing" Henry Wade. If there's a hell, I hope you're in it.

Henry Wade Press Conference Nov 24th 1963



https://youtu.be/r43IefWoO_Y?t=353

Slightly different take on what happened to McDonald inside the Texas theatre

Wade seemed so sure of Oswald's guilt on the 24th November 1963, perhaps because he'd been informed by Fritz and Alexander that the evidence was overwhelming.





Wade was not so certain 6 months later whilst giving testimony to the Warren Commission Hearings.

McBride:  

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/myers-dale-with-malice-lee-harvey-oswald-and-the-murder-of-officer-j-d-tippit

But those who carefully read his 1964 testimony will find only tepid acknowledgments that he had a case he could try in court, and admissions that he doubted the validity of much of the evidence the police claimed to him they had and that he did not know much of anything about it.




While addressing the conspiracy claims, Wade testified, "I don't know what evidence we have, we had at that time and actually don't know yet what all the evidence was." He further testified, "I never saw any of the physical evidence in the Oswald case other than one or two statements [sic], and I think I saw the gun while they were taking it out of there bringing it to Washington ... I will say Captain Fritz is about as good a man at solving a crime as I ever saw, to find out who did it, but he is poorest in the getting evidence that I know, and I am more interested in getting evidence, and there is where our major conflict comes in." Those are just some of the numerous quotes from Wade's testimony expressing doubts about the evidence.





The point of my analysis was to highlight some of the many revealing instances in which Wade let slip doubts about the evidence in the midst of his pro-forma support of the lone-gunman theory. Obviously, a leading Dallas establishment figure such as Wade, despite telling me in our 1993 interview, "I probably made a lot of mistakes," was not going to make public statements in 1963, 1964, or even much later (such as to me), that he and the police had no case at all against Oswald. But those who carefully read his 1964 testimony will find only tepid acknowledgments that he had a case he could try in court, and admissions that he doubted the validity of much of the evidence the police claimed to him they had and that he did not know much of anything about it.

Fritz is of course speaking of Tommy Lee Walker.
Tommy Lee and Venice Parker died.
Only one of theses crimes is unsolved.

Fritz used Clark and Perry from upstairs, jailor goons whom were handcuffed to Oswald for the first lineups to intimidate and abuse suspects.


This headline is more appropriate.



Now Will Fritz is famous for Not Getting His Man, and Murdering Innocent Citizens.
Of note Walkers defense team countered with no fewer than nine alibi witnesses. 
Efforts to obtain tissue and dna samples to exonerate Walker failed.

https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2017/08/efforts-fail-to-exhume-remains-of-venice-parker/

Wait long enough and Oswald evidence of innocence will evaporate too.
Cheers, Ed

One of my better ones.

Quite good Stan.
From a research and background perspective its an eye opener.

Wade and his Assistant Bill Alexander were two of the most corrupt law enforcement officials in America. So many innocent ones framed for crimes they did not commit. Of course Oswald being one of them.

Doesn't quite fit here, so a bit off topic but nevertheless this link shows that the so called science back in'63 was not up to scratch. 

https://innocenceproject.org/flawed-forensic-science-misleads-more-than-juries/

Fritz Wade Decker- A deadly combination.