The main person who is suppose to set rules is Forman. It seems that he tries to guide the conversation and keep it in order, but does not work. The Juror who casts not guilty vote, has doubts regarding the 18 year old being guilty of murder, therefore he states and shows others the doubts regarding witnesses and boys lawyer.
There are no decision rules, each men votes for himself, whether its guilty or not guilty. It seems that they are slowly changing their vote from guilty to not guilty. I think the only rule in the beginning was for the man to vote the same. Once the juror voted not guilty, they were all angry, and each of them tried to push their ideas, vote to the one juror.
Juror who voted not guilty, had clear reasoning and evidence in favor of the boy. He was able to make other jurors see, that there should be reasonable doubt to vote guilty verdict.
Emotions are playing big role. Each of the jurors come with their own bag of experiences and prejudice towards other socioeconomic levels represented by each juror. Each of the jurors had different idea of why the boy was guilty. It seems that leadership in the beginning was foreman, and he was trying to guide all of them to vote specific vote. The juror who voted not guilty became leader, and even though he had all other jurors trying to convince him to change his view, in the end he slowly changed the view of other jurors for verdict not guilty. He did not scream, did not force anybody, he simply states the facts.
There were a lot of varied emotions portrayed in this movie “12 Angry Men”. These emotions were portrayed throughout the entire movie, from the very beginning of the movie to the very last scene of the movie. The Jurors discussions started out with juror #1 took charge to set the rules as to how they were going to vote and the order in which they were even going to be seated to the order in which they were going to take turns in speaking. From this setup the juror #1 encourage a sort of democratic style of leadership by encouraging the other to voice out what they were thinking and think might work better.
It seems all the jurors were in some sort of hurry to cast their vote so they can be done with that and get to a more important business. All the jurors except juror #8 who cast his first vote by not just basing his decision on only the facts that were presented to them in the court room. All the others had their mind made up without much thought to how substantial the evidence presented were.
It was because of the boldness of juror #8 that logical reasoning was applied to come to the final unanimous NOT GUILTY verdict by the jurors. It is sad to say if juror #8 was not part of this juror group there will not have been any other form of deliberation in favor of the young boy.
I am not sure how the deliberation would have gone had it been a different crowd as the jurors for this case, in terms of gender, social class, race and marital status. Would it have been different? Maybe or maybe not. What I am sure of is that all it took was one bold and willing juror to make the difference from what started out as 11:1 in favor of the boy being guilty to 0:12 in favor of the boy not being guilty. In my opinion there were 2 leaders in this jurors. The one who led them to the best logical reasoning decision and the one who made sure some rules were in place.
Hello,
I couldn’t agree with you more. The 11 men in the movie did not seemed interested in the case. They initially went about the case as if a person’s life was not at stake. Had juror 8 not caution them on the merits of the case, they would have been in and out of the jury room in no time. A movie like ” 12 Angry Men,” shows how we sometime forget we live in a community. What effects one of us should be of interest to all of us. We have to be concern with the affairs of others, especially when its a matter of life. Great societies become achievable when we take interest in our neighbors, and work towards finding solutions to issues surrounding us all.