His trial and conviction for the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a worker at a pencil factory in Georgia, is now regarded as a classic example of miscarriage of justice. In 1915 his death sentence was
commuted by Georgia Gov. John Slaton to life imprisonment, after
Slaton reviewed the evidence and became convinced that Frank was innocent and had not received a fair trial, being convicted mainly because he was Jewish, due to a long history of vicious anti-Semitism in the American South. Later investigations showed that it was Jim Conley, a janitor at the pencil factory, who actually committed the crime.