THE SLATER CASE.
[To THE EDITOR Or THZ "SPECTATOR."] regret to see from your article in last Saturday's issue that you have been misled by the incurably partisan and careless booklet which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has published on this topic, and also by Sir Herbert Stephen's omission, in the Times article to which you refer, of the two most vital facts in the case as it stands at present. I have followed this case very closely, and perhaps you will allow me, as briefly as possible, to cite these two facts and some others.
(1) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle apparently set out to champion Slater's claim for release without having read the contem- porary newspaper accounts of the trial. Thus he lays no stress at all on the fact that Slater made a confession the moment he left the dock. Sir Arthur mentions this fact, which is given in Hodge's " Famous Trials " Series, and disposes of it by adding that Slater's solicitor denied the fact of the confession. What could he do but deny it, when he was about to organize a petition for reprieve? This confession was reported in the Glasgow Herald and other journals. Two slightly different accounts of what Slater said were given by two groups of detectives who were present ; both these accounts contained the words, " I am not the only guilty party." The variation of phrase supports the credibility of this confession. If it had been fabricated by the detectives, they would naturally have given a single report, and not two slightly varied. Sir Herbert Stephen ignores this fact, though it must have weighed with the eminent lawyers who reviewed Slater's case.
(2) Sir Arthur, Sir Herbert, and you yourself, Sir, have a good deal to say to the effect that Slater has been prejudiced because we have no Court of Criminal Appeal in Scotland. As a matter of history, Slater's case was reviewed by a Court of Appeal whose competence and impartiality cannot be questioned. Lord Pentland had the assistance of the Lord Chancellor (Lord Haldane) and Lord Guthrie, who presided at the trial. They gave Slater the full benefit of the extremely remote and minute possibility that he might have been mis- taken for another man, or that he may only have been art and part in the murder and not the actual slayer. These jurists could have advised Lord Pentland to release Slater if they had been convinced that the case against him had not been made out or had been unfairly conducted. In what way Slater could have fared better in a formally constituted Court of Criminal Appeal neither the Spectator nor Sir Arthur nor Sir Herbert has attempted to show.
(3) Now, a point as to identification. The judge and the jury, and everybody else in court saw, and could not help seeing, that Slater's face was one which it would be impossible to forget. He had a curiously misshapen nose, popularly described as " broken," and with any jury of common sense that fact would outweigh reams of disputation or conflicting evidence about fawn and grey overcoats, and waterproofs, and the man's gait and cap. One remembers a chance-seen person by his face when his clothing is inconspicuous. Slater was identified by several residents in the street where his victim lived, as a man who had been hanging about, on many days, watching her house from the outside in the weeks preceding the murder.
(4) It is surely a sufficient explanation of Slater's "volun- tary " return from America to stand his trial that he had no funds to resist extradition.
(5) It is incontestable that Slater left Glasgow in a hurry, four days after the murder, two days after the first description of him appeared in the local press, and on the evening of the day when a revised description was published. His earlier declaration of his intention to leave Glasgow was consistent either with innocence or with a. guilty knowledge of a meditated crime. He left in a hurry. He left under a new false name. He travelled to Liverpool on a London ticket—a. strangely extravagant act on the part of a man short of money, if he was not very anxious to cover his tracks.
(6) His explanation was that he changed his name to escape molestation by a legal wife. But he did not call this woman as a witness. If she had sufficient interest in Slater to pursue a legal claim upon him, she would, from purely commercial reasons (apart from motives of humanity) have come forward to save him from the gallows. But she was not called. Neither was any person called to show what business took Slater to America in such haste. Slater refused the oppor- tunity to explain these matters, and to support his own alibi.
(7) Miss Gilchrist was known to a number of• professional gamblers as a lady who kept valuable jewels in her house. Slater was an associate of these men. Slater dealt in jewels. It was not surprising that none of Miss Gilchrist's jewels was found in his house. He was interrupted before he had time to obtain any.
There is, fortunately, not the slightest danger that Slater will be released from penal servitude. This belated agitation, supported by not a single adminicle of new exculpatory evidence, has and can obtain no public sympathy in Scotland. Even if Slater were innocent—as not one Scotsman in a hundred readers of the report of his trial believed—Peterhead is the proper place for him. To quote from Lord Guthrie's charge to the jury, Slater " maintained himself by the ruin of men and on the ruin of women, living for years past in a way that many blackguards would scorn to live." Lord Guthrie explained to the jury the limited relevance of Slater's infamous character to the indictment ; it showed that he was a man apt for the doing of a brutal murder—but it showed nothing more than that. But Slater's infamous character and career provide quite a sound reason for leaving him in penal servitude. One word more. You, Sir, are inclined to belittle the Majority Verdict. At least it saves the Scotch judiciary from such an expensive fiasco as the Peasenhall case, in which a man was tried three times by juries who apparently agreed to disagree. In England the criminal law is at the mercy of any one stubborn Abolitionist who gets on a jury. In England, too, it seems to be the invariable practice, when a man is charged with murder, to pat him on trial in three independent and successive courts, to the inevitable accumulation of prejudice against him. In Scotland we put him on trial in one court only ; and he is given every facility in advance to meet and rebut the whole case that the Crown has to bring against him.
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