12 Angry Men: American Jury System

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Analysis
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

The movie, ’12 Angry Men’ showcases the trial of a young boy, who is accused of stabbing his father and causing him death. Throughout the play, the jury can follow through the actions of 12 men, who compose the jury. All of these men come from different backgrounds and the most astounding feature of the movie is in the manner that the experiences and personalities of these members of the jury influence their initial perception of the case. The personal bias and past experiences of jurors number 10, 11, and 3 are brought on focus, as they serve to inform the biased notions they have toward the accused. The film is an expose and indictment of the American jury system, which purports to uphold a strong sense of lack of bias and infallibility.

Analysis

A jury made up of 12 highly learned men is tasked with the responsibility of deciding the fate of a poor uneducated boy, who was accused of murdering his father. The provocative film then examines how the deep-seated prejudices, biases in perception, indifference to justice, ignorance, fear, and personalities among other traits of the 12 men of the jury cause them to concentrate on the superficial issues, ignoring the real issues that were involved in the case.

It takes the bravery of one member of the jury (8) to vote ‘not guilty’ and lead the other members of the jury into deliberation on the nature and facts of the case, which eventually saves the boy (Reginald). Henry Fonda, who is juror number 8, employs the tactics of reason, persistence, and persuasion to turn the decisions and perceptions of the other members of the jury into adopting a not-guilty verdict.

Henry Fonda was an architect and the eighth member of the jury. The liberal-minded Fonda is soft-spoken yet strong with resolve and calm reasoning ability. He is courageous and seeks justice for the accused in a logical, persistent, and persuasive manner. The first form of incriminating evidence against the accused is the switch knife, which the accused was said to have used in committing the murder. To test the validity of this evidence, Fonda visited the shop’s neighborhood, where the murder took place, and found similar switch knives being sold. Using this finding, he creates doubt in the mind of other jurors, as it emerges that there could have been another person with a similar knife.

The other form of evidence that the eighth juror discredits using logic is that of the two eyewitnesses. The old woman claims to have seen the accused (a blurry image of a boy) leave the scene of the murder. The old man, on the other hand, claims to have heard the accused shout that he would kill his father before he heard the sound of someone falling on the floor above his apartment. The 8^th juror reveals to the rest that the old woman’s eyesight is not good and as such, could not have made it clear that the person she saw left the scene was the boy.

He also discredited the ability of the old man to hear so accurately a man fall on the floor with his advanced age and possible hearing impairments. The boy defends his alibi, saying that he was at a movie at the time of the crime, but would not recall the name or characters of the film he watched. While the rest of the jury doubts this alibi, Fonda supports it by referring to the boy’s psychological instability, which could make him lose some of his memory.

Fonda draws from the error of fundamental attribution to further support his not guilty verdict against the boy. The rest of the jurors believed that his threat of, ‘I’ll kill you to his father was evidence enough for his alleged crime of murder. To prove them wrong, however, Fonda infuriated juror number 3 so much that he also uttered the same words, which he did not mean. Fonda created an analogy from this experience to prove to the other jurors that the boy could not have meant what he said.

Fonda argues his ‘not guilty’ stance with such persistence that he was able to succeed in turning the verdict of the other jurors (Reginald). Fonda does not waver or hesitate in conviction as he remained quite consistent against the majority stance. This makes the other jurors think deeply and twice about the issue. Some people like Sweeney believed that if a person was willing to stand by his decision, even if it brought him to ridicule, then the decision was important. It was this kind of consistency and persistence in his belief of not guilty verdict that made the others augment their faith in the same verdict. Fonda is also quite confident of himself throughout the argument. Fonda believes in his resolution that he was doing the right thing, a conviction that made the other members who later joined him on the ‘not guilty’ verdict stay confident of their decision as well.

Fonda employs a great deal of persuasion to influence and turn the jury in their verdict. He does not attempt to bulldoze the other jurors or intimidate them to turn them. Instead, he uses logic in discrediting the evidence given against the accused. He also used solid facts to persuade the other members. He visited the neighborhood of the scene of the crime and gathered tangible evidence, which he used to discredit the evidence given. Rather than going against the jurors who resisted his ‘not guilty’ argument, Fonda seeks to influence them by his argument. He lets each jury argue his case (have their moment of glory) before logically discrediting these arguments and making the other jurors share in his point of view.

Conclusion

Fonda gets the other jurors to share in his argument and adopt the need for thorough examination of the evidence rather than making hasty generalizations and assumptions through logical reasoning, his persistence in the arguments, and the effective persuasion tactics he employs. Juror number 2, for instance, logically argues on the impossibility of the accused, who was shorter than the victim, to stab the victim from the top down. In the same way, juror number 3 realizes that the battle he is fighting is not against the accused boy, but against the state of his relationship with his son, which was strained. He gets emotional and accepts to adopt the ‘not guilty’ verdict thus adopting objectivity over subjectivity in the end.

Works Cited

Reginald, Rose. 12 Angry Men. United Artists. 1957. Film.

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12 Angry Men: American Jury System

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