Henry Wade and dismissal

[page 125, line 18]

And that’s another thing. When I left the D.A.’s office, I think out of 403 trials or something, I lost four — you know, we lost four. And I thought I may have been one of the greatest lawyers that every lived until my first year and a half out in private practice, and I didn’t have one victory. I had 12 or 15 straight guilties in a row. And I thought, God, my talent’s gone. I’ve lost the edge; you know, I’m not trying enough. But anyway it was a heck of a lot of fun then.

And another thing, when Henry assigned you a case — when you got a case out of the Grand Jury, when you were a felony prosecutor, you did not have to ask anybody. You would not just dismiss something out of hand, but you wrote out your dismissal. I never had one refused. I never had Jim Bowie or Henry Wade refuse to sign a dismissal. If I wanted to reduce it to a misdemeanor or do something like that, they trusted the prosecutors they hired in those days. You know, these guys now, I feel sorry for them; they can’t make a decision, you know, about anything. And I think it’s good — I don’t know whether it’s because there are so many of them now or what. Because when I — you know, when I went to work for the D.A.’s office we were in the Records Building. The white courthouse wasn’t even built yet. I remember walking over with Sheriff Decker, as a matter of fact, and everybody took their chairs that had a back chair. Remember that? If you had a back on your chair, you dang sure wanted to make sure it got to the white courthouse. Well, he told us, he said, “Now, in a week these little old pipes they put in there in the jail are going to be full of mattress covers, and you’re going to have water dripping all through the D.A.’s office.” Sure enough, the second Monday morning the hallways were full of water and dripping through the ceiling in the jail.