What would you do? Send a young boy off to die, or let him live. Twelve men sit in a room discussing about whether they should put the boy to death or let him live the rest of his life. Convicted for murder, but only nineteen. The knife was found in his father’s chest, but the fingerprints are left unfound. In the play, “Twelve Angry Men” by Reginald Rose, the jury made the right decision to acquit the boy of the murder case because of the discussion of the evidence and of the reenactments of several scenes of the murder.
Let’s start of with the witnesses and their stories. An old man, who lives one apartment above the boy’s home, claims he heard the boy scream, “I’m going to kill you,” and a second later heard a body fall. He also claims it took him 15 seconds to get to his door, and see the boy run out. The jurors were smart enough to reenact the scene and time it to see approximately about how much time it would take for an old man with two canes to get to his door. The time was exactly 39 seconds, about 40, therefore it was impossible for the old man to see the boy run out. Moving on, a woman who has known the boy his whole life has claimed she had seen the killing. She lives across from the apartment that the boy and his father live in. The jurors were able to find out that the woman had bifocals, which means she has extremely poor eyesight. She claims she was in bed, unable to fall asleep, and the instant she rolled over to where she could see through the window, she saw the boy stab his father. People with bifocals or glasses obviously take them off when they are going to sleep, therefore, the woman couldn’t have exactly identified who those people were and what was happening. All she could have seen was a blur without h...
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...ket seller sells tickets to hundreds, maybe even thousands of people everyday. How could have he remembered the boy’s specific face then? Therefore, the boy cannot be accurately accused of killing his father.
Twelve men sit in a room, where they decided to let the boy live. There’s a quote in the movie World War Z, that says, “Mother nature leaves crumbs. Now the hard part, while you spend decades in school, is seeing the crumbs for the clues they are. Sometimes, the thing you thought was the most brutal aspect of the virus, turns out to be only a chunk in the armor. She loves disguising her weaknesses as strengths.” this shows and explains how these twelve jurors did not look deeply enough into those crumbs at the beginning, but they were able to figure them out because of Juror 8, and were able to seek justice.
Works Cited
"Twelve Angry Men" by Reginald Rose
This essay will compare and contrast the protagonist/antagonist's relationship with each other and the other jurors in the play and in the movie versions of Reginald Rose's 12 Angry Men. There aren't any changes made to the key part of the story but yet the minor changes made in making the movie adaptation produce a different picture than what one imagines when reading the drama in the form of a play.
b) Juror Five reevaluated the proper direction for that knife to be utilized. He stated that “‘[y]ou don’t use this kind of knife that way. You have to hold it like this to release the blade. In order to stab downward, you would have to change your grip.’” Juror Eight then reassured that “‘ the boy is pretty handy with a knife.’” As a result, Juror Five expressed that the boy “‘would go for him underhanded.’” (Rose 61-62). Comprehending that a switchblade knife is correctly used with an underhand and that the defendant upholds experience with knives, the person who murdered the father had to be inexperienced to utilize such an awkward angle for stabbing.
In conclusion, the story of Randall Adams’ unjust imprisonment is presented as an intersection of several people’s lives. Instead of simplifying the case for the sake of clarity, Morris points out where many stories are invited - the imagination of the witnesses, TV crimes dramas, and scenes from the drive-in movie Adams and Harris attended. He complicates the legal storytelling and his film tells that it is not easy to build these aspects of an investigation into a very structure and style. Morris however successfully closes the film by gaining the audience’s distrust of the legal system and proving that Adams was innocent. With Morris’ effort on The Thin Blue Line, the truth is found; Adams was eventually released from the death row and the Texas legal system admitted its wrongly conviction.
12 Angry Men is about 12 men who are the jury for an 18 year old accused of murder. The judge states in the opening scene that it is a premeditated murder in the 1st degree, if found guilty will automatically receive the death penalty. The 18 year old male is accused of killing his father with a “one of a kind” switch blade, in their home. The prosecutors have several eye witness testimonies, and all of the evidence that they could need to convict the 18 year old male. In the movie it takes place on the hottest day of the year in New York City. There are 12 jurors whom are to decide if the evidence is enough to convict the teen of murder in the first degree. In the first initial vote it is 11-1. The only way that the jurors could turn in their votes was if there was unanimous vote either guilty or not guilty among the 12 jurors. As the movie progressed the jurors ended up changing their minds as new evidence was brought to their attention by simple facts that were overlooked by the police and prosecutors in the initial investigation. Tempers were raised, and words flew, there was prejudice and laziness of a few of the jurors that affected the amount of time it took to go over all of the eye witness testimonies and evidence. The eye witness testimonies ended up being proven wrong and some of the evidence was thrown out because it was put there under false pretense.
Twelve angry men is a play about twelve jurors who have to decide if the defendant is guilty of murdering his father, the play consist of many themes including prejudice, intolerance, justice , and courage. The play begins with a judge explaining to the jurors their job and how in order for the boy to be sent to death the vote must be unanimous. The jurors are then locked into a small room on a hot summer day. At first, it seems as though the verdict is obvious until juror eight decides to vote not guilty. From that moment on, the characters begin to show their true colors. Some of the characters appear to be biased and prejudice while others just want justice and the truth. Twelve Angry Men Despite many of the negative qualities we see
Finally, the argument about the glasses swayed everyone just enough to withdraw the guilty verdict and set the boy free. My next claim is in regards to the “old man” juror. If it were not for him voting not guilty the second time, the boy would have been found guilty. He said the reason he voted that way was because of one juror standing up to the other 11 jurors. He felt that everyone needed to hear all of the arguments because they were dealing with a man’s life.
Yet with the help of one aged yet wise and optimistic man he speaks his opinion, one that starts to not change however open the minds of the other eleven men on the jury. By doing this the man puts out a visual picture by verbally expressing the facts discussed during the trial, he uses props from the room and other items the he himself brought with him during the course of the trial. Once expressed the gentleman essentially demonstrate that perhaps this young man on trial May or may not be guilty. Which goes to show the lack of research, and misused information that was used in the benefit of the prosecution. For example when a certain factor was brought upon the trail; that being timing, whether or not it took the neighbor 15 seconds to run from his chair all the way to the door. By proving this right or wrong this man Juror #4 put on a demonstration, but first he made sure his notes were correct with the other 11 jurors. After it was
As time goes on he becomes more and more passionate and seems to be somehow personally involved with the case. At one point, he tells the other jurors about an argument between him and his son. Juror 3 and his son had an argument which made his son run away. When his son returned to apologize, Juror 3 hit him for leaving the first time thus leading him to run away once more. He has not seen his son in two years and this has left him somewhat bitter inside. His anger toward his supposed ungrateful son is projected toward the young man on trial. Juror 3 has no concern for the life of the defendant. He makes it clear that he would have been an executioner and would have pulled the switch on the boy himself. His personal troubles have imposed on his ability to come to a verdict.
In the play Twelve Angry Men, a boy is on trial for supposedly murdering his father after a night of arguing. Rodney King, twenty-five, was beaten by four caucasian Los Angeles Police Department officers on March 3, 1991 (CNN Wire 1). On this day, King was pulled over for exceeding the speed limit while intoxicated (Kaplan 1). The jury of both of these cases played a major role in the verdict of each case. In the play Twelve Angry Men, the twelve men that make up the jury are faced with a difficult decision to make; deciding whether or not a nineteen year old boy was guilty of murder. Fast forwarding forty-three years later, twelve jurors were given the Rodney King case in which they had to decide the fate of the four Los Angeles officers that brutally beat Rodney King, an African-American citizen. Being a member of the jury on the Rodney King case must have been a difficult task given the evidence surrounding the trial.
Seemingly juror ten exists not only for conflict, but to demonstrate to the audience that personal biases may affect the way the jury thinks. Being one in a room of twelve individuals, juror ten truly withholds the essence of an angry
For example, the old man that lived beneath the boy and his father testified that he heard a fight between the boy and the father and heard the boy yell, “I’m gonna kill you,” along with a body hitting the ground, and then claims that he saw the boy running down the stairs. With this information, along with other powerful eyewitness testimonies, all but one of the jury members believed this boy was guilty. The power of eyewitness testimony is also shown in Loftus’s (1974) study. In this study, Loftus (1974) found that those who claimed to “see” something were usually believed even when their testimony is pointless. She discovered in her study that only 18 percent of people convicted if there was no eyewitness testimony, 72 percent of people convicted when someone declared, “That’s the one!”, and even when the witness only had 20/400 vision and was not wearing glasses and claimed “That’s the one!”, 68 percent of people still convicted the person. This proves that in 12 Angry Men and Loftus (1974) study, eyewitness testimony is very powerful and influential in one’s decision to convict a
There have been several cases in which eyewitness testimony led to the conviction of an innocent person. In one notable case, Raymond Towler was wrongly convicted in 1981 of the rape, kidnap, and assault of an 11-year old girl based on eyewitness testimony in which the victim and other witnesses identified him from a photo. Towler had been serving a life sentence and was released in 2010 after serving nearly 30 years until DNA evidence proved that he did not commit the rape (Sheeran, 2010). In another case, Kirk Bloodsworth was convicted and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl near Baltimore in 1984. Five different eyewitnesses testified that they saw him at the scene of crime. After serving nine years in prison on death row, he was released and paid compensation after traces of semen found in the victim’s underwear excluded him as the person responsible for the crime. Although he was released, he was not formally exonerated for another decade until the real killer was found, Kimberly Shay Ruffner. Ruffner was already incarcerated for unrelated crimes and was identified after the DNA sample from the crime scene was added to state and federal databases and came back as a match for him. Despite the fact that Bloodsworth was a completely different height and weight than Ruffner, five eyewitnesses testified that they saw him at the murder scene (Marshall, 2009).
Guilt, Duty, and Unrequited Love: Deconstructing the Love Triangles in James Joyce’s The Dead and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure
As a child, your parents always told you that old moral lesson, “What goes around comes around.” Some may call it good luck or bad luck, but I refer to it as karma. When one is faced with a moral choice, he or she has to differ right from wrong. People are hesitant about making the wrong decision because the outcome you may endure is the negative feeling of guilt.
A case study titled Problems with Eyewitness Testimony talks about a famous Canadian case in which a 14 years old boy named Steven Truscott, was convicted in 1959 of rape and murder of a 12 years old, Lynne Harper. It was later found that the conviction was based upon unreliable police investigation, 10 years old Philip Burns, (eyewitness) contributed greatly to the conviction. Police and other law enforcement figures failed to question Burns’ recollection of that night. It was known that at the time of the crime, Burns failed to remember whether he had in fact seen both the suspect and the victim on the road. Police argued in Burn’s favor in order to convict Truscott. Burns, as well failed to remember seeing other people on the road with him. These very people reported seeing Burns. (Bain p.351)