IMAGINE IT IF you will. Two months out of law school, you barely know torts from tarts, law boards from floorboards, a paphawk still nursing at the breasts of Mother Justice as one of District Attorney Henry Wade’s newest recruits. You’ve spent days slogging through prosecutorial boot camp over in the Purse Building with the other thirty-seven attorneys working misdemeanors. Now for the first time, there it is, the legendary summons clipped to the DWI folder of Mr. Big. See Me. H.W. My God! What have you done? The Chief has reached down through and around the other cubbyholes and rabbit warrens, passed over 154 other lawyers, and wants you. Bowel-loosening fear!
You go over the case in minute detail. No clue emerges. It’s a One Officer-No Test-DWI, one of thousands that are the bane of your existence. A guy is arrested for driving drunk. Refused the breathalyzer test. Swearing match. No different from many of the other 16,000 annual DWIs except for the defendant, Mr. Prominent Citizen, who seems to pop up in the newspaper more often than the crossword puzzle. He’s co-chair of the Spring Galaxy Gala for the Undescended Testicle Foundation or the Dizzyness From Standing Up Too Fast Fund. And for the state, you, Buck Private Maggot, still oozing with passion to uphold Article 201 of the Code of Criminal Procedure-“It shall be the primary duty of all prosecuting attorneys, including special prosecutors, not to convict but to see that justice is done.” And that includes Mr. High Profile, too. So up you go to the seventh floor of the courthouse, into the office of The Chief, where all interested parties have gathered. As usual, the semi-mythical District Attorney of Dallas County for the past thirty-six years appears not only to be eroding his unlit cigar but eating it. He rips off a small bale of tobacco leaves and chews. For a while, nothing comes out. And these are not Winston Churchill’s favorites, the expensive seven-inch Romeo y Julietas or La Aroma de Cubas, but funky, stubby Travis Clubs. Finally he takes a mouthful of cold, black coffee strong enough to support a mouse, swills it around, then spits the tobacco-coffee puree earthward. As far as the interested parties can tell, most of it splats onto the floor.
Even a lowly grunt like you can see that Mr. Fete Set has come justice-shopping. He really believes he’s not a criminal because he knows Wade or he’s a good friend of W.O. Bankston or he’s donated to all of Henry’s campaigns. “Why, shoot, if Mr. Wade sees it’s me being prosecuted, the whole thing will disappear,” he thinks. Holding court, Mr. DA seems very interested, willing to negotiate. “Now what’s the story on this?” he asks you. “Well, that looks pretty good, don’t you think? He’s got a point there, young man. Too bad it ain’t the old days when we might consider a ’deferred’ [non-conviction probation] on this thang.” Then Mr, DA’s asking the man about his family. “Your son still playing ball? How’s the wife? Say, you want some fresh onions or potatoes from my farm?” All this is punctuated with rip. chew, spit, rip, chew, spit.
Mr. Savior of the Pet Psoriasis Endowment leaves with a confident smile. Your heart sinks. The Certified Public Legend’s a fraud. Mother Justice has been blindfolded and mugged. Then, an hour later, you’re back in your miserable quarters when the file returns with a note from The Chief: “Good work. Stick it to him. H.W.” D-Day! Up and out of the trenches! Damn the torpedos, full steam ahead!
IT HAS ALWAYS been so in Henry Wade’s army. If the big shot had known where to look up on the DA’s west wall, the one covered in framed photographs, mementos, plaques, and awards, he would have gotten the message, Up there is a yellowing Dallas Morning News cartoon published in 1951, Wade’s first year in office. A line of stripe-suited prisoners with “DWI” printed across their backs marches toward a jail cell. The caption below reads “The Wade Parade,” the slogan of his victorious campaign.
Thirty years before DWI-bashing became chic, before outrage and senseless death produced MADD, Henry Wade campaigned on a pledge to drastically reduce drunk driving in Dallas County by vigorous prosecution, a policy he zealously pursued once elected. The significant thing to remember-and a key to understanding Wade’s remarkable record since- is that he chose an offense that cuts across all socioeconomic barriers. DWI is committed by worthies of the bench, bar, and bank, as well as pick-and-shovel men. Every courthouse crony knows the famous story of how Henry Wade prosecuted his own brother, Ney, for driving drunk, and then, when ol’ Ney called up Henry to complain about how cold the cell was, Henry replied, “Well, Ney, get the man to bring you a blanket” before slamming down the phone. But do they remember that The Chief threatened to make the arresting officer, who had decided not to file charges upon learning the identity of his suspect, an ex-cop unless he did his duty?
During his twenty years of practicing criminal defense law in Dallas. Vincent Perini has represented many prominent citizens and visitors charged with DWI or soliciting prostitutes or gambling. “Sometimes during our discussion I see a glint in their eye,” says Perini, “and I find myself saying, ’I am giving you all the alternatives. There are no others. You are in a modem, computerized jurisdiction where cases do not get lost or fall into cracks. Furthermore, there is no corruption in the DA’s office here. No hidden agenda, no secret way of doing it.”
As current president of the Dallas Bar Association in the year that Henry Wade leaves office, Perini thinks often of the DA’s contribution to his own particular work. “If the system ran on corruption, if you had to scratch somebody’s itch to make it work, it would put, myself and many others in an impossible moral bind and we would have to leave,” he says. “Wade makes it possible for honest men to be criminal lawyers, so Dallas is one of the few places in America with a plethora of very competent criminal defense attorneys because the DA plays the game by the rules. They play rough. Like the Chicago Bears, they keep coming. Occasionally you get face-masked, but they don’t break your legs after the whistle blows.”
BUT NOW THE ERA ends. For thirty-six years the name Henry Wade has had for Dallas the impact of a secret formula to lock up or destroy bad guys, has contained as much potency as “Rumpelstiltskin” or “Rapunzel.” Only once did he fail to get the sentence he requested, when jurors chose life imprisonment for an armed robber instead of death. Thirty times Wade asked for the death penalty, twenty-nine times he got his wish. His oldest friends-attorneys Tom Unis and Bob Strauss; car dealer W.O. Bankston; wife Yvonne; and brother Mart all campaigned for Wade during his unsuccessful race for district attorney in 1946. They say he has changed remarkably little in forty years. Sedate, circumspect, and cautious; reserved but not distant; more capacity than genius; can comprehend better than invent; tranquil and unruffled in the vortex of legal confusion; above all, a character that always comes out open and honest.
Not well traveled or cosmopolitan. Wade created out of his own texture, borrowed nothing, copied nothing, just searched within himself. But the first requirement of being yourself, of course, is having a self to be, and the Wade Self is a result of his devotion to three things: family, farm, and office. From the beginning they have defined the areas of his life like a fence; they are responsible for his strengths and failings, his Calvinistic moral strength that needs little bolstering from public approval. They account for Wade the whole person who, to the public, still emits an aura of impunity as cautionary as an electric fence, yet at home never misses an opportunity to scoop up a grandchild to serve time in grandpaw’s lap. No one can remember when Henry Wade wasn’t a house lamb and a street lion.
THE FARM
Henry Wade once shot a man. Actually, the victim was a boy. Not just any boy, mind you. He shot his own brother. It was an accident, of course. The boys were out hunting, Faires running out front flushing rabbits, when he heard a BOOM and his back turned red, pimpled with buckshot. From assault with a deadly weapon, the future law enforcement legend turned to arson. An old hog in the barn hadn’t moved in several days, so Henry and Reece built a fire under him. The porker survived, but the elder Henry Menasco Wade wasn’t too pleased that the barn burned down.
This youthful crime spree occurred on the forty-acre family farm near Rockwall where Henry Wade was born and where, with his ten brothers and sisters, he experienced a rural, four-square, baking-powder-biscuit upbringing. Seven miles southeast of his birthplace, Mr. DA farms and raises cattle on the 140 acres he has owned since 1965. Working the land and messing with cows in this tiny corner of Texas he has known for seventy-one years, where old-timers know him as Hank or H.M.. is Henry Wade’s therapy. The idea of travel gives him a severe pain in the sitter; he leaves the impression he would rather be force-fed eight pills of roots and toad venom than drive any farther than Rockwall County from his house in Lakewood.
Every Saturday Henry Wade, dressed as though he has a charge card at an ancient Wool-worth’s (old flannel shirt, older blue jeans, a hat that was old when God was a boy), forgets the felons for farming, looking over the forty acres of winter wheat with O.B. Alexander, his caretaker for many years; eyeballing the huge truck garden (3,000 onions. 150 pounds of potatoes, every American vegetable found in Sateway); checking the wobbly fences that are still standing but hardly horse-high, hog-tight, or cattle-strong; or walking the back pasture until the last of the cows are winkled out of the creek bed and scrub bush. The house isn’t fit for habitation, but the cattle and crops are healthy and the tractor runs. Shabby gentility mixed with unobtrusive ruin: not much different from the original family farmstead.
Politics and law already were a Wade tradition when Henry, number nine, (mother Lula had three girls and eight boys in fourteen years) arrived on November 11, 1914. Grandfather Wade: Texas Senator, one of the “Immortal 13” who voted with Governor Sam Houston not to secede from the Union, member of the 1876 Constitutional Convention and its leading advocate for universal free public education in Texas; Henry M. Wade, Senior: schoolteacher, lawyer, county judge, and county attorney of Rockwall on and off for thirty years.
All eleven Wade kids earned college degrees. Six of the eight boys became lawyers. While in high school, Henry spent many an afternoon watching father versus older brother in the Rockwall courtroom, silently rooting for his brother who seldom scored a legal victory against the patriarch. “Hank” excelled in in-terscholastic league debate; graduated valedictorian of his class; captained the football team and won a scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin. Just before Henry left for UT, his father sold a bale of cotton to help with expenses. Henry left with $85; it was the last time he received any money from home.
Once in Austin, he fell in with the brightest politicians and leaders-John Connally, Bob Strauss, Tom Unis, Jake Pickle. Uniting under the anti-fraternity banner, they controlled UT student government for years, electing Pickle, then Connally president of the student body and Wade president of the law school. In 1938, he graduated with honors (second in his class), and, after the death of his father, rejected an offer from the prestigious Houston law firm, Baker & Botts, to return home. It was not long before a fifth Wade was elected Rockwall county attorney.
Just before the war years. Wade joined the FBI, investigating spy and sabotage cases on the East Coast and in South America, then resigned to join the Navy and served in the Pacific aboard the carrier Hornet as an aircraft controller.
THE OFFICE
The citizens of Dallas County in 1946 found it impossible not to burst out yawning when a new resident and upstart lawyer named Henry Wade announced he was running against incumbent Will Wilson for district attorney. Even then Wade was sure of himself; self-confidence surrounded him like a force-field, as it does forty years later, and was a major factor in attracting his old friends to help: Unis and Strauss pitched in, as did W.O. Bankston, who had just opened a car lot at Ross and Olive and lent the campaign its only car. An ad man created his slogan, “Henry Wade is not afraid,” but the voters were and placed Wade third, He and Unis promptly went to work for the winner, and when Wilson resigned to run for attorney general in 1950, Wade ran again and won. Only once did he again try for higher office, losing a congressional race to Bruce Alger in 1956. Wade was urged to oppose the ultraconservative Republican congressman by Democratic leaders, particularly U.S. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, a long-time family friend and a man Wade admired intensely. As a brass-collar Democrat, the DA supported the full ticket, including Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauyer running against the more popular Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon for the presidency. Alger rode Ike’s coattails to victory.
A word here about the office. The district attorney, elected every four years, is the legal representative of the state in the prosecution of those accused of crimes. He derives his power from the constitution, law, and custom, and is a dominant force in criminal proceedings and trial court action from first clue to conviction or acquittal. From the beginning. Wade decided to pursue his duties and run his office with the single-mindedness and power of a freight train. He always has been a man above vulgar material priorities, never had an eye cocked toward $500 suits bearing designer labels like battle decorations, uptown law firms with marble stairs between floors, polite clients, civil suits-no, from the first his ambition was to spirit the outlaws out of Dallas like a whirlwind from the second book of Kings.
Dallas and Wade’s reputation and office grew together in a steadily ascending arc of prosperity and population. Dallas, with 434,000 souls in 1950 and almost a million today, has mushroomed from an uncomplicated town to a huge, complex city with more levels to understand than a ziggurat. The growing city also attracted record numbers of crooked citizens who regarded booming Dallas as irresistible burglary-bait; gamblers and wise guys and car thieves; killers with hard eyes. As the crime rate soared, Henry Wade did not greet these new citizens with indifference. Over the years, through thousands of cigar-butt strategy sessions, he exerted his influence on the office and his men and developed prophylactic canons and customs of procedure and practice on how the DA’s office can make it hotter than the First Baptist Hell for lawbreakers in Dallas County.
Most important, dispose of cases. Adopt, as the unofficial motto for young lawyers, “Experto Crede.” (Believe One Who Has Tried It.) Hire the best you can get and throw them in the deep end the first day without nose clip, ear plugs, or goggles, because the disposition of cases is paramount. If you have to, work out a reasonable plea bargain; it’s not true that plea bargaining distorts the judicial system. It’s been used for a century. Even the Watergate Special Prosecution Force with all its talent and money settled an overwhelming number of cases through negotiated pleas.
Dismiss if you have to; try is before judge or jury, but if the latter, be sure you win. Juries do not merely determine the outcome of the cases they hear; through a trickle-down effect, their decisions profoundly influence huge numbers of cases that are settled through informal means. Defense attorney Vincent Perini agrees: “When defendants are winning acquittals in the courtroom, it encourages other defendants to plead not guilty, to try their luck, and the whole system slows down.” Prosecutors like to win, but more importantly, they do not like to lose. See Me. H.W.
To help ensure excellent prosecution records, maintain a heavy influence over the grand jury. This body of citizens hears evidence concerning the crime and formally absolves or charges the suspect. Let the bad cases out the back door through grand jury no-bills so that “true-billed” cases are win-nable cases. A good grand jury is a rubber stamp of the DA’s office. And you can blame the grand jury if the perpetrator continues to be a nuisance. Hey, we filed; you no-billed.
Wliile shifting the screening decision to the grand jury, continue to file as many cases as possible. Remember, the number of office prosecutors is determined by the number of courts and the number of courts is dictated by the number of case filings and so what if we file more cases than the much larger, more populated, more violent Harris County? More courts, more prosecutors (who often become judges), more power. Don’t encourage visiting liberal judges; accept grant monies from the feds for a specialized organized crime section, a public corruption unit. Another power base.
In the courtroom, Henry Wade’s real strength was picking sympathetic jurors; whether poor plug-ugly or socialite, he quickly could sense their leanings. Once a colleague advised him not to accept the woman who insisted it was “Ms.” not “Miss.” “Naw,” said The Chief, “she’ll be fine. Those women libbers want to be tough as men.” And she was. Jurors took only an hour and fifty minutes to sentence Jack Ruby to die. In his last courtroom appearance in 1973, Wade asked the jury to sentence Franklin and Woodrow Ransonette, kidnappers of the daughter-in-law of Dallas Morning News publisher Joe Dealey, to 5,000 years. The twelve good citizens returned after deliberation and announced the verdict: 5,005 years.
Henry Wade and his staff received their first significant public criticism in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the absurd era of Draconian sentences. Wade didn’t muzzle mad-dog prosecutors like David Pickett, Jon Sparling, or John Stauffer. They would wind themselves up, strike twelve, and strip-mine the emotions of the jury to win 1,000-year sentences, twenty-five years for possession of a marijuana cigarette, or five years straight time for Gary Allen Deeds, charged with the heinous crime of wearing a small American flag on the back of his jeans.
It. was very competitive. Who could put the scandal vandals so far back in the jail house that their meals were delivered by golf carts? “They got very publicity conscious and would call me saying, ’I got another thousand-year sentence’ and then be upset if we didn’t make a big story out of it,” says Henry Tatum, editorial writer for The Dallas Morning News, who covered the DA’s office in those years.
Certainly the verdicts reflected the tenor of the times and many citizens’ disgust with “revolving-door justice” when a life sentence might mean only ten years served. But the multi-lifetime sentences “made us look like legal buffoons,” according to State Senator Oscar Mauzy, who led the fight to rewrite the penal code to avoid such nonsense. After 1977, prisoners served at least one-third of their sentence; thirty years now means they see at least ten annual Huntsville prison rodeos.
It was in this era, in 1971, that Henry Wade worked his last death penalty case. Rene Guzman and Leonardo Lopez bound the hands of five lawmen with stereo speaker wire, took them to the Trinity River bottoms, and murdered three of them. The sensational trial was moved to Bellville on change of venue. The court appointed former Dallas Criminal District Judge Don Metcalfe to represent Lopez.
“Mr. Wade picked the jury and participated in the final arguments,” Metcalfe recalls. “His first assistant, Doug Mulder, was put on the case and was absolutely brilliant. I would have liked to have seen Mr, Wade in his prime. He was a bit rusty, very good with the jury, but got carried away in the punishment argument.”’
Guzman and Lopez got the death penalty, but the case was reversed for two reasons: one, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the state’s proceedings involving the death penalty were unconstitutional, and two, Henry Wade gave improper jury argument by including facts and figures that were without evidence and outside the record.
Doug Mulder served as Henry Wade’s first assistant longer than anyone-seventeen years, leaving in 1981 to begin his lucrative criminal defense practice. Most say he was Wade’s best-efficient office administrator, hatchet man. brilliant in court-and that the problems that have surfaced of late wouldn’t have if Mulder still cracked the whip. Since Mulder left, the DA’s office has been sullied by public bickering with certain judges and threats to review their records; charges of “forum-shopping” (switching misdemeanor cases to a more sympathetic court); and censure by the Dallas County Criminal Bar Association for endorsing two Democratic judicial candidates. Personally, these last years in office were trying for Henry Wade. He suffered a heart attack in 1979, a year after his wife, Yvonne, began the first of her fourteen subsequent operations to combat cancer.
Then in 1982 the law came down on a black man like a hawk on a field mouse in a case that brought an acid rain of scorn onto the district attorney’s office and critical national attention. The arrest was an unimportant incident at the lime, yet significant beyond itself, like the hundredth sparrow that breaks the twig. Lenell Geter. twenty-six, E-Systems engineer, convicted of robbing a Balch Springs convenience store, gets life imprisonment. The case unravels, with holes in it you could drive a truck through. The “60 Minutes” report says nothing new but tells the whole country about racism in Dallas and drags the city’s image through the mud. Testimony is recanted, charges are dropped when another suspect is found; then along comes the Republican National Convention and who needs the bad publicity? Geter is released and prepares for the movie, book, and TV appearances.
“It wasn’t all Wade’s fault,” says Peter (“Remember Geter, Vote For Peter”) Lesser, a past president of the criminal bar association who got 40 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary opposing Wade in 1982. He’s running again this spring. “Geter is symbolic of the whole sysiem breaking down. The pressure to try cases; an old visiting law-and-order judge who wouldn’t postpone when he knew the defense wasn’t ready. The tragedy here is, that’s nothing new. It happens every day because the DA wants results.”
Wade still does not give an inch on l’affair Geter. He thinks Geter is guilty, won’t apologize, remains churned and clabbered on the issue. “Why should I apologize to the man when I was the one that cut him loose, when we had five witnesses that said he was the one, and discovered later five instances of him lying on the witness stand in the trial?” Wade asks.
THE FAMILY
Henry Wade always has found pleasure in uncomplicated rituals, repeated patterns of the past. Golf with buddies like Jim Justice, Charlie Lattimore, and Blackie Palmer every Friday afternoon at the Lakewood Country Club; Saturdays at the farm; domino games; eating lunch every day at the downtown Holiday Inn; taking Yvonne to Campisi’s Egyptian for Italian steak; watching reruns of “Gunsmoke”; and having all the kids and grandchildren over Saturday nights for steaks, potatoes, and salad.
He always cooks them in the oven, country style, not outdoors. Every Saturday night he asks once again how you ]ike your meal and then always says the same thing: “I can always cook them more but I can’t cook them less.” Always drowns his in A.1. sauce; always laughs at Don Knotts and Tim Con-way and his favorite movie. The Ghost and Mr, Chicken, and almost always says, “There ain”t never been no bad potato.”
“He was the perfect father and I had a perfect childhood, so good it was shocking to learn others didn’t,” says Kim Wade, an assistant U.S. attorney who, in the Wade tradition, hasn’t lost a case in three years. Kim Wade was born in 1952, and his father has been DA literally all his life. “He never missed a ball game or awards banquet. He took me with him to speeches; he sat me down behind Melvin Belli and Jack Ruby when I was eleven years old. My birthday is on Christmas Eve and I never had much of one until Dad took me up in the jail where Sheriff Bill Decker’s boys had baked a cake for me and my friends.” Last December on a cold night, eight-year-old Wade Branden-berger, “Boomer” to his friends, played his final soccer game of the season. Standing on the sidelines, his grandfather the DA. old hat pulled over his ears, the inevitable cigar (rip. chew, spit), watched his first grandchild boot the ball. Later the DA clapped at the awards banquet, cheering, perhaps, the heir apparent who recently was elected president of his class.
“He gave us a sense of roots, honesty, a down-to-earthiness that most of my friends don’t have,” says Michele Wade Branden-berger, Henry Wade’s oldest child. “My father would be happiest if, like the Waltons, we all had to move back home. What’s interesting is that his own father was so stern, strict, unemotional. Dad said he couldn’t remember ever being hugged, or tucked in at night, or told he was loved by his dad. Grandad’s wife called her husband ’Mr. Wade’ until the day he died. Yet my father is exactly the opposite.”
Despite an occasional hitch in their getalong. the district attorney’s office has been working well under chief felony prosecutor Rider Scott. The prosecutorial juggernaut handles more than 70,000 cases a year, achieving a 92 percent felony conviction rate. Though the crime rate continues to rise, Wade continues to blame the judges, pointing to his 1985 Annual Felony Report showing Judge Francis Maloney presiding over just twenty-six trials; Judge Gary Stephens, thirty (’Those two have never tried a case,” The Chief says contemptuously); Judge Kinkeade, thirty-four; Judge Scales, thirty. “Used to try an average of seventy in my day,” Wade drawls as he spits once again.
Retirement? Three law firms have offered him an office, but he doesn’t know yet. A Canadian wants to buy his farm for $3,500 an acre. “That’s about $560,000, and I paid $300 an acre,” Wade says. “My accountant tells me I’m gonna lose $20-$25.000 this year, so maybe I’ll sell the place.” The talk slows a bit, like a wagon taking on an extra load. “Yvonne and I already get $20,000 social security and I’ll get $70,000 state retirement, so I’ll be all right. I don’t owe a thing.”
Homeric similes spring naturally to mind on Henry Wade’s retirement, since the line to sing his praises is already at epic length. It is a wistful time, happiness shaking hands with sadness; his friends and admirers hate to see him go, but he’s leaving the stage in good health surrounded by loved ones. Now that the fait is accompli, the legend is busy becoming official. Memorable incidents, remarks, and stories already are being passed around in the courthouse hallways, in private clubs and smoky bars like informal minutes of previous meetings.
“Remember when his brother Ney had a heart attack during a domino game and Henry told him to stretch out on the couch until they finished the hand, then they’d go to the hospital?”
“What about that prosecutor who got down on his knees in a prayerful manner and said, ’Please, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, in the name of God and Henry Wade, return the proper verdict.’ Then he ran over to The Chiefs office and apologized. ’Next time, Mr. Wade, I’ll give you top billing.’”
“During the Ruby trial, 01’ Henry was corrected by the judge for saying ’Melvin Bell-eye.’ He replied that he would cease and would be glad to take the learned counselor out for some spaghett-eye!’”
“Or the time someone torched his car in the driveway and Henry slept right through it. The fireman woke him up knocking on the door. Or the time Yvonne complained about the house carpet being worn all the way through in the hallway and Henry nailed the doorstep welcome mat over the worn spot where it stayed a year.“
On they go into the night until the tale-swappers are almost moved to lift their hats, very much as one does for reasons of state, religion, or death. The city’s respect for Henry Wade brings to mind the way the Austrians regard Mozart, They don’t just put his portrait in the window, they wrap it around a globular blob of chocolate called a Mozart-kugel. They make sugar busts of him. They eat him. Say, doesn’t that statue of chocolate with the old hat and stumpy cigar look like Henry Wade?
HENRY WADE’S MILESTONES
July 27, 1946: Wade loses his tint race for DA, placing him third behind Will Wilson.
November 7, 1950: Wade wins his second race for DA.
March 22, 1951: Wade successfully prosecutes his first death penalty case in the murder of a young police officer.
November 6, 1956: Wade loses congressional race to Republican Brace Alger.
March 14, 1964: jury returns death penalty for Jack Ruby, killer of Lee Harvey Oswald.
June 30, 1971: Wade argues his last death penalty case in Guzman-Lopez murders.
January 22, 1973: the Supreme Court’s verdict in Roe vs. Wade legalizes abortion.
April 6, 1973: Wade makes last courtroom appearance during Ransonette brothers kidnapping case.
October 22, 1982: Lenell Geter sentenced to life for armed robbery.
December 14,1983: Geter released from Dallas County Jail.
May 3, 1986: Wade’s name absent from ballot for the first time in forty years.
