Henry Wade - Legacy

Legacy

Wade once again gained national attention in 1988 with the release of Errol Morris’s documentary film The Thin Blue Line. The documentary is the biography of Randall Dale Adams. 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. Similar cases of exonerated men have recently arisen, putting the legality of Wade's practices in question.

As of July 2008, fifteen persons convicted during Wade's term as Dallas County District Attorney have been exonerated of the crimes for which they were accused in light of new DNA evidence. Because of the culture of the department to "convict at all costs," it is suspected that more innocent people have been falsely imprisoned or even executed. Project Innocence Texas currently has more than 250 cases under examination.

A recent report by John Council of Texas Lawyer, however, analyzed the overturned convictions on a case-by-case basis and found that the wrongful convictions were generally caused by unfortunate coincidences and victim mistakes in identifying their attackers, especially because of the impossibility of DNA evidence at the time of trial.. The high number of overturned cases seems to be largely a result of Wade's unusual policy of maintaining all evidence even after a trial had been completed, as well as the emphasis that the issue has been given in the Dallas area, especially under the direction of current DA Craig Watkins. In addition, the prosecutors interviewed for the report denied misdeeds or wrongdoing on both individual and departmental levels, and also accused pundits of imagining the "convict at all costs" culture for their own purposes.