Oscar Slater

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.

Early life Slater was born Oskar Josef Leschziner in Oppeln, Upper Silesia, German Empire, to a Jewish family. Around 1893, possibly to evade 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.

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. Woodlands. 49 West Princes Street. Marion Gilchrist's house. 2020.

In December 1908, Marion Gilchrist, aged 83 years, was beaten to death in a robbery at West Princes Street, Glasgow, after her maid, Helen Lambie, had popped out for ten minutes. Although she had jewellery worth £3,000 hidden in her wardrobe, the robber, who was disturbed by a neighbour, He was convicted by a majority of nine to six (five "not proven" and one "not guilty"). However, Slater's lawyers organised a petition that was signed by 20,000 people, and the Secretary of State for Scotland, Lord Pentland, subsequently issued a conditional pardon and commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.

The Case of Oscar Slater Roughead's book convinced many of Slater's innocence; influential people included Sir Edward Marshall Hall; Ramsay MacDonald; (eventually) Viscount Buckmaster; and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

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.

Criminal Appeal (Scotland) Act 1927

1927 saw the publication of The Truth about Oscar Slater by William Park. The contents of the book led the Solicitor General for Scotland, Alexander Munro MacRobert, to conclude that it was no longer proven that Slater was guilty.

More recently, the Slater case has been revisited by several scholars and writers.

Legacy The lessons of the Slater miscarriage were considered, as late as 1976, by the Devlin Committee review on the limitations of identity parades.

As a result of controversy around the Slater Case and its aftermath, Scotland created the Scottish Court of Criminal Appeal (see above).

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