Twelve Angry Men Essay, Research Paper

Twelve Angry Men

This play is about twelve jurors who are to decide the verdict of a 19 year old boy who is accused of killing his father. The jurors go into a room with the foreman to talk about the case and decide on a verdict. The vote has to be unanimous either guilty or not guilty for the case to end. To start the deciding, the jurors decide to take a preliminary vote to see where they stand. After counting the ballots the vote is 11 to 1, guilty. Juror number eight is the one who votes not guilty. The reason that juror eight voted not guilty was because he was not sure that the boy was guilty and he wanted to talk about it. One of the jurors decided to take a minute for each juror to tell their side of the story and what they personally think about the case. After a lot of main points were made such as there being two of the identical knives, the woman in her apartment saying she saw the murder take place through the window of the El train, and how the old man said that he heard the boy say that he was going to kill his father and then went to his door to see the boy run down the stairs. After all of this has taken place they decide to take another vote. The verdict is still 11 to 1 in the favor of guilty. Juror eight is now going over the time periods of when the woman said she saw the murder. Juror eight is also trying to explain how the man could not have seen the boy run down the stairs because the old man would not have had enough time to get out of bed. After juror eight makes all of his points they take another vote. This time the vote is now 6 guilty and 6 not guilty. Juror ten is very disgusted at how a lot of the jurors are changing their votes. Some of the jurors now start to get into a fight about how the boy was able to stab his father who was six inches taller than him. Now a new vote is taken and the count now is three guilty to nine not guilty. The jury is again arguing about how the lady could have see the killing. The subject that is brought up is that she wears glasses and she did not have her glasses on when she supposedly said she saw the murder. Now juror four changes his vote to not guilty and juror three is the only one left voting guilty. Juror three sits there for a long time looking at the rest of the jurors and then he finally changes his vote to not guilty. Now the vote is unanimous twelve to none in the favor of not guilty.