By now you are well aware of how easy it is to “cherry pick” evidence. In the article you just read, Mike D’Angelo makes the case that the jurors in 12 Angry Men made a big mistake in their assessment of the evidence: while there was room for reasonable doubt about any of the pieces of evidence taken individually, their combined weight really leaves no room for doubt. Do you agree with his assessment? Why or why not?
26 thoughts on “Did 12 Angry Men Get It Wrong?”
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“Well, there’s some bit of doubt attached to all of them, so I guess that adds up to reasonable doubt.” No. What ensures The Kid’s guilt for practical purposes, though neither the prosecutor nor any of the jurors ever mentions it (and Rose apparently never considered it), is the sheer improbability that all the evidence is erroneous.”:
I agree with Mike D’Angelo’s assessment regarding the jurors making a big mistake in their assessment of the evidence. With every piece of evidence that was presented, it is suffice to show that there was no tampering or framing of evidence to set up “The Kid” of this crime against his father. I can see how the randomness of owning a similar switchblade like the defendant can cause some doubt, but only in a situation where it was found of evidence and foul play was discovered. As D’Angelo mentioned the O.J. Simpson case, most would believe based upon the evidence presented along with D.N.A. ,that O.J. Simpson is undeniably guilty. The factor of the evidence being tampered with and planted to frame O.J. Simpson presents a substantial factor in assessing his innocence especially of the public figure and social status he had as an African-American Athlete was a threat to some with prejudice mentality. Thus we can entertain the idea that it is possible that O.J. was setup by someone to frame him for a crime he did or did not commit. In the case of the defendant in 12 Angry Men, there wasn’t any evidence or information given that this could have been the case like the Simpson trial, therefore the factor of randomness can be dismissed. In this day and age, D.N.A. testing would have been a major influential factor in assessing the innocence of “The Kid”.
Mike D’Angelo is pointing out how improbable it would be in the real world to have a myriad of evidence that is all completely proven false. When someone commits a crime, police work to collect as much evidence as possible to prove their case. I spoke once to someone who worked at the Brooklyn Courthouse, and he said how shows like Law & Order and CSI have skewed how people weigh evidence. For example, someone sells drugs to an undercover cop. The cop is a witness, perhaps there is a second witness, and the suspect has a previous record of having drugs with intent to sell. However, a jury may not be convinced unless there are fingerprints and DNA on the drugs themselves. People put a preference and weight to certain evidence over others.
Placing an emphasis on one piece of evidence was also evident in 12 Angry Men. Juror number 3 was adamant that the eyewitness testimony was without a doubt the most important piece of evidence. Once that evidence was brought into question, he began to question his own thoughts on the situation. As juror number 2 points out, “It’s hard to put into words. I just think he’s guilty. I thought it was obvious from the word, ‘Go’. Nobody proved otherwise” and Henry Fonda responds, “Nobody has to prove otherwise. The burden of proof is on the prosecution. The defendant doesn’t even have to open his mouth. That’s in the Constitution.”
It was also the severity of the punishment that compelled the jurors to be absolutely certain The Kid had committed the crime. Had the sentence been lower, to either life in jail or for twenty years with possibility of parole, there may have been more room for the jurors to believe The Kid was guilty. Although the jurors were not primarily concerned with The Kid’s fate, it did cause Henry Fonda’s character to question the evidence and the need to be absolutely sure of The Kid’s guilt. “Well, there were eleven votes for guilty. It’s not easy to raise my hand and send a boy off to die without talking about it first.” Although prosecutors work to have a strong case against a murder suspect, sometimes there are mistakes that have been made. Innocent men have been placed in jail and even on death row. Guilty or not, the jurors had to be extremely sure there was no doubt to send The Kid to his death.
I believe that D’Angelo has a valid argument that the combined weight of the evidence really makes The Kid appear to be guilty. However, if you place importance on one piece of evidence over the other, such as the eye witness testimony over the knife, then perhaps there is room for some doubt. Reasonable doubt, as presented in 12 Angry Men, was not a matter of being not guilty, but that there was a chance that The Kid was not guilty. No one ever truly claimed he was innocent of any wrong-doing, but more that there was some doubt as to his involvement in his father’s murder. As Fonda states, “It’s always difficult to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And wherever you run into it, prejudice always obscures the truth. I don’t really know what the truth is. I don’t suppose anybody will ever really know.”
After reading D’Angelo’s critique, I am leaning towards his assessment. He is right that you can doubt each piece of evidence, however, when D’Angelo states ‘But as Bugliosi notes of both Simpson and Oswald, in the real world, you cannot have that much damning evidence pointing at your guilt and still be innocent, unless all of it was deliberately manufactured.’ The same is true for the case of The 12 Angry Men. Particularly, D’Angelo’s assessment of the knife that not only would a duplicate knife had to be used, but The Kid would have to loose his own knife within the time frame of his father’s death. With the additional evidence presented (despite Fonda’s dramatic knife purchase), it is highly unlikely everything is coincidental and/or leaves reasonable doubt.
“What ensures The Kid’s guilt for practical purposes, though neither the prosecutor nor any of the jurors ever mentions it (and Rose apparently never considered it), is the sheer improbability that all the evidence is erroneous. You’d have to be the jurisprudential inverse of a national lottery winner to face so many apparently damning coincidences and misidentifications. Or you’d have to be framed, which is what Johnnie Cochran was ultimately forced to argue — not just because of the DNA evidence, but because there’s no other plausible explanation for why every single detail points to O.J. Simpson’s guilt. But there’s no reason offered in ’12 Angry Men’ for why, say, the police would be planting switchblades.”
I agree with D’Angelo’s assessment of the ’12 Angry Men’ verdict. The 12 jurors handed down a not guilty verdict and I agree they made a mistake. D’Angelo points out the implausibility of all the facts in the case if the kid was innocent. All the evidence is circumstantial and there is a lot of it. He discusses the O.J. Simpson trial and the two can go hand in hand. Most people believed O.J was guilty regardless of the verdict and if you think of it that way then the kid in ’12 Angry Men’ was also guilty.
I guess the evidence can mount against the defendant in 12 angry men if you add them all up. However as we saw in the film each fact of evidence can be picked apart to show that there is still room for reasonable doubt. I believe it is a strong argument to show that there is a large sum of evidence against the defendant however even if there is a slight thought of reasonable doubt the defendant should be set free. Therefore This article hasn’t changed my mind. I still believe that the jurors are able to prove that there is a reasonable doubt. No matter how unlikely it may seem.
I think D’Angelo’s article made some interesting points on assessing the evidence and how the jurors in 12 Angry Men made a mistake, however I still believe that the jurors are able to prove that there was reasonable doubt. Similarly, the movie illustrates how each element of evidence can be dissected to the point where there is a level of doubt. I happen to believe that there is plenty of evidence that goes against the defendant. But it is also my belief that if there is still reasonable doubt, then the defendant should go free. It’s better to let a guilty man walk, then an innocent man go to jail.
While watching 12 Angry Men I wondered why the Kid’s attorney hadn’t pointed out any of the flaws in evidence. I was concerned that a part of the movie was a message that public defenders were not efficient. So while reading D’Angelo’s article I did understand his questioning of all the holes in evidence. I do think it is strange that every piece of evidence was flawed. But realistically, it was a movie. In reality, I think if there is a reasonable doubt, you should not convict. I do believe in innocent until proven guilty and if you’re not 100% sure of guilt then set the Kid free.
After reading the article I do agree with Mike D’Angelo that how could all the evidence presented be erroneous. He states that “determining whether a defendant should be convicted or acquitted isn’t—or at least shouldn’t be—a matter of examining each piece of evidence in a vacuum. “Well, there’s some bit of doubt attached to all of them, so I guess that adds up to reasonable doubt. No.” I think you need to look at the whole case in its totality. Some pieces of evidence presented might be strong while others are weak and may not be key points.
After watching the film “12 Angry Men,” I was satisfied with the Juries decision to declare the boy as not guilty on the basis of reasonable doubt. However, as I was reading Mike D’Angelo’s argument against the juries decision, I came to the realization that the way evidence is presented and structured can be eloquently modeled and molded to gain support for either argument. It is then solely up to the attorneys and nature of the jury to determine how they are going to internalize the evidence that is presented.
If one presents the evidence in the way in which Henry Fonda did, then it is safe to say that many would be convinced of the boys innocence. Portraying an ounce of doubt in every piece of evidence, in sum, will create a heavily weighted reasonable doubt.
If one presents the evidence in the way in which Mike D’Angelo is suggesting, then it is safe to say that no jury in their right mind would agree on the boys innocence. Angelo, does a perceptional job rationalizing on the basis of probability. The truth is that the odds of such extensive evidence ,working against the boy, being solely due to coincidence is highly unlikely and improbable. Sometimes it is possible to just be at the wrong place at the wrong time; however, being at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the murder weapon, without a viable alibi, and with possible motive is highly unlikely. Angelo’s argument allows us to recognize that every jury will innately be somewhat bias. If one has a preconceived notion of an individuals innocence or guilt, it is evident now that they can sway the evidence in such a way to seal someones fate for better or for worse.
I believe in innocent until proven guilty. I agree with Mike D’Angelo that if looking at the jurors’ combined weight there isn’t much room for reasonable doubt and in that sense the kid should have been guilty. I also think that because there was room for reasonable doubt with the pieces of evidence taken individually, it was important to consider his innocence. I think in the case of “12 Angry Men” it important to consider his innocence on the grounds of reasonable doubt because in the film the option was free if not guilty and death if guilty. In real life its not so black and white and other punishments can be suggested. Because of this I was happy that the jury ruled not guilty based on reasonable doubt. I also think its important to remember that evidence can be used strategically to favor one side over the other so its important to look at the bigger picture.
I don’t feel the jurors got it wrong. The prosecution has to “prove beyond a reasonable doubt.” They left to many holes and Fonda found them. All you really need to find is one hole and build on that and it could blow the case up. The knife twisting scene was convincing for me. And the eye witnesses stories left doubt for me too. Look, when I first began watching the film, I thought “the kid” was guilty too. But then after the jurors starting discussing he evidence, doubt crept in, and so I changed my mind. I think the jurors got it right. Seems like the police, detectives and prosecution were a little sloppy. If you’re going to convict someone for capital murder you better present a tight case.
After watching 12 Angry Men, and then reading the article, I still think I am going to side with the jury’s decision of innocent. In the movie we can see a lot of heuristics, especially the representative kind. They lump the accused into a group of “those people” that live in a not so good part of town, and justify that alone as a reason for him being guilty. If it weren’t for Fonda’s character in the film breaking down each piece of evidence in order to show that there was reasonable doubt, the young boy would have been sent to the chair within minutes of the jurors meeting.
The article kind of takes the side of the 7 other jurors that were in the film, stating that there wasn’t reasonable doubt and comparing this movie to the actual murder that OJ Simpson committed. In OJ’s crime, it was clear to see that he was guilty of all parts. He even fled the scene in the white Bronco when they found the bodies, if that wasn’t a dead give away, no pun intended, I don’t know what was.
The author of the article points out that in order for the kid to be innocent they would have had to plant the evidence. Back it that day in age, that could have happened and it wasn’t evidence that was the hard to plant. A switchblade knife that most kids owned would have been easy to plant. And there could have been a reason why someone attacked the father, that wasn’t the son. They did live in a seedy neighborhood; it could have been a break in. The window was open, as one of the jurors saw from her window. Kids back then all had similar hairstyles and clothes; she could have confused him with someone else.
In all I still think there was reasonable doubt and the evidence didn’t all add up for to convict the young boy. The article here is using cognitive dissonance in mu opinion to find the boy guilty. He believes that the boy is guilty, but the movie proves other wise from the breakdown of evidence, so he changes his attitude (tone in the article) and even uses comparisons to a real life crime to justify his beliefs.
I still believed that the 12 Angry Men are corrected in proving that the Kid is innocent. I do understand what Mike D’Angelo trying to reason and tell us from his perspective. Since, he has his own right to say what he thinks and believes, but it all one-sided for he did not have other people’s input on his own opinion. Similar to the other Jurors who initially believed that the Kid was guilty of stabbing his father to death. However, through reasoning and arguments from Juror#8, the other Jurors started to question their supposed evidence. In other words, D’Angelo is acting like a tyrant on his decision, while the 12 Angry Men actually have clear democracy and deliberation on their decision.
D’Angelo essentially used the same rhetorical devises to suggest that the Kid was – or could have been – guilty that Fonda/the filmmaker does to suggest reasonable doubt. Fonda chips away at the reasonableness of one at a time – and D’Angelo chips away at the unreasonableness of the whole set of “reasonable doubt” stories.
But they both make some underlying assumptions:
One assumption is that the answer is findable – that one (a juror) could actually make an informed decision of guilty/not guilty (which is not the same as innocent).
And even more basic – that there is an answer to find.
I though D’Angelo’s article was fun to read because it was iconoclastic and I enjoy that kind of reasoning. But it did not convince me that the Kid was guilty any more then Henry Fonda convinced me that the Kid was innocent.
And that’s not really the question, anyway.
I agree with D’Angelo’s assessment. At the beginning, 11 jurors stand on the guilty side, Fonda claimed that the boy’s life deserved to be further discussed, since the judgment was merely based on the statements of two witnesses. What if the evidence is not the truth? “By doubting, we are led to question; by questioning we arrive at the truth”. Each piece of evidence are untenable under the scrutiny of reasonable doubt. Unfortunately, it seems that 12 jurors went too far on the path of seeking truth. At the end, 12 jurors swayed from one side of “scale of justice” completely to the other. It’s “either…or” dilemma, the falsity of one proof doesn’t guarantee the truthfulness of the contradictory of the proof. As it goes: “Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
If “bad” prejudice (for guilty) dominated the beginning of deliberation, then “good” prejudice (against guilty) affected jurors to make rational decision. It is self-selection bias that jurors selectively picked up the evidence which was in favor of their judgment, ignored the portion which might be contradictory to their standpoint. In this case, although each individual piece of evidence can’t stand for the examination of reasonable doubt, the part of their combined truthful value is disregarded.
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth”. Seeking truth is open-end process to exclude any possible bias or misconception.
D’Angelo makes quite the case that the jurors in 12 Angry Men got their verdict wrong. With such an interesting topic, I read through some of the comments on the avclub website itself, and found some interesting discussion between some hardcore fans of the movie. Those comments swayed me into thinking that while D’Angelo may be right about the use of individual evidence not taken as a whole, the core decision of the jury was still right.
Clearly, the cliche moral of the story is that one individual can change the minds of many if they stand up for their ideas righteously. However, an often overlooked and more political aspect of the film is the threshold of doubt needed for capital punishment, and the ways in which a jury deals with that.
Was the use of evidence individually rather than coupled together not the best way to go about deliberation? Probably not. However, the seeds of doubt that were planted, however reasonable they may or may not have been, is arguably enough to not risk ending the life of a teenage boy. As a society, we’ve decided that its more important to let guilty people go free than to let an innocent person rot in jail – or in this case, die.
To latch onto this week’s readings, someone in the comments of the AV club pointed out something very interesting that I just wanted to quote here:
“Both of the eyewitness accounts there smack of confirmation bias — they saw something, the cops implied to them that what they should have seen was the kid, and so in their minds they made it into the kid that they saw. I can’t tell you how many stories I remember, with 100% clarity, totally incorrectly, just because I’ve thought about them so many times that the incorrect details have overtaken whatever the actual reality of the situation was. ”
This is absolutely true, and shows how even some of D’Angelo’s interpretation could be wrong. Overall, I agree with his premise – that the evidence coupled together may prove The Kid guilty. However, those individual points of doubt still exist – and for that, the jury was in right in not ending his life.
D’ angelo makes a very good argument for why the juror in 12angry men could have been wrong but he actually points out that “The Kid’s guilt for practical purposes, though neither the prosecutor nor any of the jurors ever mentions it (and Rose apparently never considered it), is the sheer improbability that all the evidence is erroneous” which I believe is the same argument that Fonda uses to prove the kid not guilty. D’ Angelo is saying the probability of the evidence being erroneous is unlikely and Fonda chose to believe it was more impossible for all this evidence stacked up against the kid to be true. I didn’t finish watching the movie with certainty that the kid was innocent but there was enough evidence available for me to have reasonable doubt.
I dont agree with D’angelo’s assessment though he makes some compelling points. Fonda stated through the whole movie that he was not sure the kid was innocent but he was not sure if he was guilty and that is the exact premise of reasonable doubt. Our court system operates on reasonable doubt; the juror had reasons they believe the kid could be not guilty, even it was one silly reason, the juror was right for letting him go.
The focus of 12 Angry Men is the method people use come to conclusions. At the start of the movie, the jury is 11-1 convinced of the guilt of the defendant because many jurors have fallen victim to cognitive shortcuts when analyzing the evidence. Juror 8 is able to employ a more methodical approach to analyzing the evidence. This is a huge improvement in the soundness of the jury’s approach, and leads them instead to come to a verdict of “not guilty”. However as the AV Club article pointed out, the jury did not fully consider the evidence as a whole. This was a shortcoming in their method.
However our justice system is designed to allow for the risk of letting a guilty person go over the possibility of incarcerating or killing an innocent person. This is why all defendants are innocent until proven guilty, and the burden is on the prosecution to prove guilt. In the trial, the prosecution did not prove the defendant was guilty. Perhaps if the prosecution had objectively analyzed the evidence as a whole, the jury would have come to a guilty verdict. But the prosecution did not. The system worked as it was supposed to.
Mike D’Angelo provides some good analysis on how the jurors supposedly made a mistake in their assessment of the evidence. However, it’s still hard for me to side with him on this issue.
Yes, the collective coincidence of all the evidence is too much for the kid to be innocent. However, as proven in the movie, each piece of the evidence is flawed. If each piece of the collective puzzle can be so easily refuted, the collective whole should not hold as much weight as the author thinks it does.
There’s a reason why evidence needs to have a standard of beyond a reasonable doubt. A lot of the evidence in the movie are linked together and are not necessarily strong.
Even if the knife was his, it doesn’t mean the kid used it. As demonstrated by the jurors, the kid was shorter and would have had to stab in an upward motion, which would be different than the way his father was killed. This, I think, was the main reason they refuted the knife. It was not that they believed he lost the knife but it was the way the father was stabbed, which is probably the most important piece of evidence.
If the movie had went the route the author wanted, we can have another article written about how the jurors got it wrong. It’s a movie with only 90 minutes to tell the story. Not everything gets to be explained. Sometimes things are left vague and open on purpose. You cannot expect a detailed breakdown of every single piece of evidence in 90 minutes.
You can question whether Tony Soprano dies in the end of the series all you want but if David Chase comes out and says he’s alive, you have to accept it. If the writer of 12 Angry Men intended for the boy to be innocent then he is.
I don’t agree with D’Angelo, although I certainly recognize his overall sentiment as valid. It is true that, without another suspect it is hard to think of any way that the murder could have been pulled off by another person. But isn’t that the source of all great mystery novels? By the end of the story you find out that person X had committed the murder and when you go back and revisit the story and the evidence provided it all suddenly makes sense (and if you’re like me, you get mad that you didn’t figure it out earlier!) In this scenario we don’t have person X so it’s difficult to imagine another scenario.
Also, I think that D’Angelo undermines his own argument toward the end of the last paragraph when he says “The Kid is almost certainly guilty.” Exactly. A jury cannot convict someone for being “almost certainly” guilty. Even if it seems unlikely to me true, there was reasonable doubt so I think the jury came to the correct conclusion.
I can see D’Angelo’s point that the evidence is stacked against the Kid but I believe the 12 Angry Men Jurors got it right. They weighed each individual piece of evidence had doubt which means the prosecutor did not do his job. It 12 Angry Men they did not believe the Kid was innocent, they just didn’t believe the burden of proof was met. The prosecutor is tasked with the job of proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt.
The article by Mike D’Angelo argues that the Twelve Angry Men must have incorrectly acquitted the Kid based on reasoning that, while seemingly logical when examined piece-by-piece, is in actuality faulty when viewed as a whole. More specifically, D’Angelo states that it is extremely improbable that the little bit of doubt associated with each piece of evidence necessitated doubt about all the evidence.
I agree with D’Angelo to some extent. After all, as D’Angelo writes, “Some of these coincidences are individually believable—it’s quite possible that both eyewitnesses honestly convinced themselves they saw The Kid, when they actually just saw a vague figure. But as Bugliosi notes of both Simpson and Oswald, in the real world, you cannot have that much damning evidence pointing at your guilt and still be innocent, unless all of it was deliberately manufactured.” It just seems improbable that so many coincidences happened in relation to the same event.
At the same time, however, it is important to consider the context of the situation. Where those coincidences all really such uncommon occurrences in the Kid’s world? In an inner-city setting, in which murder is all too common, the coincidences that occurred in the case of the Kid may not have been so doubtful. As Juror 8 pointed out, the kind of switchblade that the Kid owned and that was used to kill his father was very common in the neighborhood. The fact that the Kid yelled “I’m going to kill you!” to his father that morning; was that a common statement used among people in the Kid’s neighborhood? I am not saying that D’Angelo is not right; on the contrary, I believe that his argument is based on reason. I just also think that it is important to consider evidence within context, and to avoid assuming that any once occurrence is unlikely to occur simply because it is not common in one’s own world.
From my understanding, in the movie, the jurors never said the kid was innocent, they just couldn’t agree on reasonable doubt and burden of proof. D’Angelo has done a pretty good job in doubting every explanation from the defendant one by one and yes if one thinks like that, very conservatively, the odds for all those events to happen together are not that great but then again they are not that unthinkable either.
If the child was being abused, use of that kind of language on a daily basis”i will kill you” should not be a surprise to anyone. Also, as a shock to a parent’s death or any person’s death really there can be temporary memory loss, it’s a proven fact, especially when it is the first dead person you see, ever.
As for the lost knife used by the killer, what if the defendant really did lose that knife somewhere around the house as everyone of us loses things daily. I lose my keys five times a day, and the killer very conveniently and probably without planing used the same knife because he/she found it on the floor or under the couch or something. While all the evidence mentioned in the movie and in the article, if looked conservatively and without a chance for doubt, can be very convincing, it is still very circumstantial and I am not convinced by the article at all. I think there have been crimes more perfect than this, by planning, by chance but especially when by chance the crime is usually the closest to perfect.
I understand where Mike D’Angelo is coming from, but I cannot agree with his stance. I suppose if you take into consideration the entire weight of the evidence, its either very unlikely that he’s innocent, or very unlucky to have this evidence stacked up against him. But that’s exactly what 11 of the 12 jurors also felt. They were convinced “the kid” was guilty based on the amount and extent of the evidence. However, with the help from juror #8/Fonda, there is a reasonable doubt that the kid might be innocent. And according to law, jurors are told that they can only find the defendant guilty if they are all convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of the defendants guilt. Also, D’angelo did not address the biases and prejudices driving the most authoritative/assertive jurors arguments and how it’s impacted the other jurors. After revealing all the reasonable doubt in the evidence, and considering some flawed traits that were driving a personal agenda for some jurors, I’m going to have to say the jurors were right in saying not guilty.
In my opinion, hard, science-based evidence needs to be available if we were to use capital punishment.
I disagree with Mike D’Angelo’s opinion. I believe that all circumstances were challenged and discredited through scientific method. When the author points out that if the court were to find out that Fonda concluded his own investigation makes me question D’Angelo’s motives in this article. Why even bring out how Fonda challenged the authority? Whether Fonda went against the system (authority) to ensure a just and fair trial is takes precedence because a young boy life is at stake. I like to first question my source and consider their motive when they are basing their opinion then decided if their opinion comes from a place of personal bias. If it does then I take their speculation with a grain a salt. However, he does bring out a good point, that everything that you hear, can be discredited to fit your belief system. Nothing is for definite in a trial because you personally were not there when the crime took place. We have to rely on scientific methods, psychology and experience in order to arrive at a justifiable conclusion especially when a life is at stake. D’Angelo used a touch of cognitive dissonance or confirmation bias, himself when he used OJ as an example of guilt. If we are over 30 we can all remember the heartache and pain during the OJ trial. With all the scientific analysis we have developed a bias. I am not saying OJ is innocent because as we can recall that the gloves were outside in an uncontrolled environment. Prior to the authorities finding the gloves it had rained for three days in Los Angelos. Cheap leather shrinks after being soaked in water especially gloves hence “gloves don’t fit”. Going back to D’Angelo, I still question his motives and with that I do not accept his findings as being factual.
Prior to reading Mike D’Angelo’s article, it did appear that Juror 8 had rightly vindicated the Kid. However, when one really looks at Juror 8’s method of reasoning, it appears to be faulty. As Mike D’Angelo explains, it is extremely unlikely that so many pieces of evidence were all faulty. True, it is possible that one or two of the proofs brought against the Kid were in fact not backed by logic. However, what are the chances that so many proofs were not true? As D’Angelo says, “How many times have you yelled “I’m going to kill you!” at your father?” The likelihood that so many proofs were really just coincidences is small.