Henry Menasco Wade was a prominent American lawyer who served as the District Attorney of Dallas County, Texas, from 1951 to 1987. He gained national recognition for prosecuting Jack Ruby, the killer of JFK's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Wade is most famously known as the defendant in the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade, which established a woman's constitutional right to an abortion. His long and controversial tenure as a prosecutor left a significant mark on American legal history.