The county will remove the name of former district attorney Henry Wade, who led the prosecution of Walker for a rape and murder he could not have committed.
By Tracey McManus
Dallas Morning News
https://www.dallasnews.com/
Seeing former Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade’s name atop the juvenile justice center for the past 30 years has always hurt Edward Lee Smith.
On May 12, 1956, Smith’s 21-year-old father, Tommy Lee Walker, was executed in the electric chair for a rape and murder he could not have committed. Witnesses testified Walker was with his girlfriend who was in labor with Smith at the time of the 1953 attack on Venice Parker.
The Commissioners Court put Wade’s name on the juvenile justice building in 1995 even as wrongful convictions from the district attorney’s 36-year tenure were mounting.
Now Walker — not Wade — will represent juvenile justice in Dallas County.
The Commissioners Court has agreed to rename the Henry Wade Juvenile Justice Center for Walker, the one known innocent person put to death amid the former district attorney’s extensive record of wrongful convictions.
Smith called the renaming a step toward justice.
“For years I wanted that name down,” Smith told The Dallas Morning News on Monday through tears. “Now my prayers have been answered.”
In 1995, when the Commissioners Court named its juvenile detention center after Wade, six people wrongly convicted during his tenure had already been exonerated.
Since then, the total has grown to at least 31 people exonerated after prosecutions that began while Wade was in office, according to The National Registry of Exonerations.
In January, the Commissioners Court declared Walker innocent in an emotional ceremony to culminate an investigation by the Dallas County district attorney’s office, the Innocence Project and the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project. It was symbolic because official exonerations can only be granted by the courts or the governor granting a pardon for innocence.
‘Historical atrocities’
Walker “like so many exonerees of Dallas County fell victim to a system that devalued the lives of Blacks, minorities and poor Whites for decades,” said the county resolution to rename the juvenile detention center introduced by Commissioner John Wiley Price on Nov. 3.
Wade served in office from 1951 to 1987. His 2001 obituary in The New York Times states Wade secured 29 death sentences in his career, though Price said Walker’s is the only wrongful execution “that we know of.”
Price was the Commissioners Court’s lone vote against naming the juvenile justice center for Wade on Feb. 15, 1995. He cited wrongful convictions already confirmed at the time, including Price’s then-executive assistant Joyce Ann Brown, who spent nine years in prison for a murder she did not commit.
Renaming the juvenile justice center has been floated for some time. Price said momentum advanced after the county’s symbolic exoneration of Walker in January.
The renaming, he said, is another way to confront a deep injustice.
“This was just one of the historical atrocities that were committed under Henry Wade’s tenure,” Price said Monday.
The county will host a ceremony to remove the letters of Wade’s name from the juvenile justice center and replace them with Walker’s in December, according to Price. It will be 70 years after Walker’s execution.
“This is just the moral arc of the universe bending, and at the end of the day, as Dr. (Martin Luther) King said, it bends toward justice,” Price said.
Bending to justice
On Sept. 30, 1953, 31-year-old Venice Parker was found with her throat slit under a bridge near Dallas Love Field, according to previous reporting from The News. The store clerk and young mother had been stabbed and raped while waiting at a bus stop on her way home from work.
Two American Airlines employees driving to work found Parker and took her to the airport for help, according to an investigation by the Innocence Project. Responding Dallas police officer J.W. Gallagher later reported Parker told him a Black man attacked her, though the airline workers and a nurse did not hear her say anything, the Innocence Project stated.
Four months later, police interrogated Walker after receiving a tip about his alleged involvement. Walker insisted he was innocent because he was with his girlfriend in labor.
But after intense interrogation by police, including by a one-time member of the Ku Klux Klan, Walker signed a confession. He quickly recanted, but his fate was sealed.
Walker was convicted by an all-white jury on March 29, 1954, despite witnesses who corroborated his alibi at trial. The court sentenced him to death.
He was executed in the electric chair on May 12, 1956, when Smith was 2. Smith told the Commissioners Court in January how this wrongful execution drove him into a lifetime of grief and his mother into alcoholism and despair.
“It hurts every time I talk about it because I miss my father,” Smith said.
Walker’s story was revived in 2016 through an investigation by D Magazine, in which journalist Mary Mapes detailed the overlooked facts.
After the Commissioners Court’s January ceremony for Walker, calls to remove Wade’s name from the juvenile justice center intensified.
One of those advocates, Southern Methodist University human rights scholar Rick Halperin, said in a statement putting Walker’s name on the juvenile justice building will be profound.
“A facility entrusted with the lives and futures of young people should stand for fairness, rehabilitation, and respect for human dignity,” Halperin said. “Tommy Lee Walker was denied all of these.”
Dallas County Reporter
Tracey McManus joined The Dallas Morning News in October 2024 and covers Dallas County government. She previously spent nine years as a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times in Florida and five years as a reporter for The Augusta Chronicle in Georgia. Tracey is a graduate of the University of Florida with degrees in journalism and Spanish.
