9-5-18
Roe v. Wade’s forgotten loser: The remarkable story of Dallas prosecutor Henry Wade
Breaking Newstags: Supreme Court, womens history, Roe v Wade, Henry Wade
To Texans, he was unforgettable. As Dallas County prosecutor from 1950 to 1986, Wade never lost a case he personally tried. His office racked up convictions some, it later turned out, falsely — at the pace of a prize thoroughbred. He prosecuted Jack Ruby after he shot and killed Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas police headquarters in 1963.
And yet to the rest of the country, Wade is largely forgotten, a fact that boggles the mind given that his name is attached to perhaps the most controversial Supreme Court decision in U.S. history.
Roe v. Wade
This summer Wade’s name has been in the news again as the Senate weighs the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, who could be the fifth justice needed to overturn the landmark abortion decision. On Wednesday, asked repeatedly about the case, Kavanaugh declined to say whether it was decided correctly.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel