Oscar Slater

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Oscar Slater 1908
Oscar Slater's hammer

Oscar Joseph Slater (8 January 1872 – 31 January 1948) was the victim of a notorious miscarriage of justice in Scotland. Wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death, he was freed after almost two decades of hard labour at Scotland’s HM Prison Peterhead through the efforts of multiple journalists, lawyers, and writers, including Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.[1]

Early life

He was born Oskar Josef Leschziner in

military service, he moved to London, where he purportedly worked as a bookmaker using various names, including Anderson, before settling on Slater for official purposes. He was prosecuted for alleged malicious wounding in 1896 and assault in 1897 but was acquitted in both cases.[2]

In 1899, Slater moved to Edinburgh and by 1901 was living in Glasgow. He was known to be a well-dressed dandy, who billed himself variously as a dentist and a dealer in precious stones, but was believed to earn his living as a gambler.[2][3]

Marion Gilchrist

The victim's dining room and the site of the murder[4][5]
Woodlands. 49 West Princes Street. Marion Gilchrist's house. 2020.[6]
Square Mile of Murder. Location of murder top circle.

In December 1908, Marion Gilchrist, a spinster aged 83 years, was beaten to death in a robbery at

pawn ticket for a brooch.[2]

The police soon realised that the pawn ticket was for an entirely different brooch and a false lead, but notwithstanding the contradictory evidence, still applied for Slater's extradition. While Slater was advised that the application would probably fail anyway, he voluntarily returned to Scotland to clear his name of the alleged crime.[2]

Trial of Oscar Slater

At his trial presided over by

Peterhead Prison.[12]

The following year, the Scottish lawyer and amateur criminologist

identification parade.[2]

Slater received little support from within Glasgow's Jewish community, which was attributed towards concerns around drawing attention to Slater's Jewish identity in light of the case's notoriety and the potential for a rise in antisemitism as a result.[13]

The Case of Oscar Slater

Roughead's book convinced many of Slater's innocence; influential people included

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.[2] In 1912, Conan Doyle published The Case of Oscar Slater, a plea for a full pardon for Slater.[8]

In 1914, Thomas McKinnon Wood ordered a Private Inquiry into the case. A detective in the case, John Thomson Trench, provided information which had allegedly been deliberately concealed from the trial by the police. The Inquiry found that the conviction was sound, and instead, Trench was dismissed from the force and prosecuted on trumped-up charges from which he was eventually acquitted.[2][12]

Criminal Appeal (Scotland) Act 1927

Criminal Appeal (Scotland) Act 1927
Act of Parliament
17 & 18 Geo. 5. c. 26
Dates
Royal assent22 December 1927
Other legislation
Repealed byStatute Law (Repeals) Act 1977
Status: Repealed

1927 saw the publication of The Truth about Oscar Slater by William Park. The contents of the book led the

Alexander Munro MacRobert, to conclude that it was no longer proven that Slater was guilty.[2]

An Act (

Scottish Court of Criminal Appeal
to convictions before the original shut-off date of 1926. Slater's conviction was quashed in July 1928 on the grounds that Lord Guthrie had failed to direct the jury about the irrelevance of allegations relating to Slater's previous character.

Aftermath

Detective-Lieutenant Trench died in 1919, aged fifty, and never lived to see justice done.[2]

After serving an almost two-decades long prison sentence of hard labour, Slater received only £6,000 (2019: £364,170) in compensation.[2] He met his most famous advocate, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, only once in-person; they had a public falling out when Conan Doyle demanded he "be a gentleman" and pay his supporters back for legal fees, which Slater did not.[3]

In the 1930s, Slater married a local Scottish woman of German descent thirty years his junior and settled in the seaside town of Ayr where he repaired and sold antiques. He also returned to using his birth name surname. As an enemy alien (born German), Slater and his wife were interned for a brief time at the start of World War II, though Slater had long since lost his German citizenship due to his imprisonment and never returned to Germany. Most of Slater's surviving family, including his two sisters, ultimately were murdered in the Holocaust. He died in Ayr in 1948 of natural causes.[14]

More recently, the Slater case has been revisited by several scholars and writers.[1][15][16][17][18][3]

Legacy

The lessons of the Slater miscarriage were considered, as late as 1976, by the

identity parades
.

As a result of controversy around the Slater Case and its aftermath, Scotland created the

Scottish Court of Criminal Appeal (see above).[14]

In Glasgow rhyming slang, See you "Oscar" rhymes Slater with later, although the expression has long been out of use.[19]

The murder of Marion Gilchrist remains unsolved, but no additional charges have ever been made.[20]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Margalit Fox, "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Case of the Wrongfully Imprisoned Man", Medium, 21 June 2018.
  2. ^
    Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
    , Oxford University Press, 2004.
  3. ^
    ISBN 978-0399589454
    .
  4. ^ "Trial of Oscar Slater". Edinburgh ; Glasgow : Hodge. 22 October 1915. Retrieved 22 October 2019 – via Internet Archive.
  5. ^ "The Case of Oscar Slater". National Records of Scotland. 31 May 2013. Retrieved 21 February 2022.
  6. ^ Geoff Holder. The Guide to Mysterious Glasgow. Stroud: The History Press, 2009.
  7. ^ a b The Times, The Case Of Oscar Slater. Sir Herbert Stephen And The Evidence, 19 September 1912.
  8. ^ a b The Times, "The Case of Oscar Slater," 21 August 1912.
  9. ^ The Times, Glasgow Murder Trial 6 May 1909.
  10. ^ The Times, Index 7 May 1909.
  11. ^ "The Oscar Slater Case". Conan Doyle Info. 11 July 2020. Retrieved 20 February 2022.
  12. ^ a b Roughead, William (1941). "Oscar Slater". In Hodge, Harry (ed.). Famous Trials. Vol. 1. Penguin Books. pp. 72–74.
  13. ISSN 0018-2648
    .
  14. ^
    OCLC 1030445407
    .
  15. ISBN 978-0862414511
    .
  16. ISBN 978-0750945738
    .
  17. ISBN 978-1250079565
    .
  18. ISBN 978-1897784884
    .
  19. ^ The Herald Punting across the great divide, 13 January 1998.
  20. ^ "Murder of Marion Gilchrist – 1908 – Glasgow Police Museum". Retrieved 2 January 2024.

d==Further reading==

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Case of Oscar Slater.
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