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?
24 thoughts on “Did 12 Angry Men Get It Wrong?”
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I have to stay I still think that they should have found the kid not guilty (now, that’s not to say he’s definitely innocent).
I do think that D’Angelo makes some valid points that the likelihood of all of those pieces of evidence being faulty is highly unlikely. But, he goes along by saying “Here’s what has to be true in order for The Kid to be innocent of the murder.” The problem with this statement, and with his case, is that the jurors are not looking to prove innocence, they are looking to see if there is a reasonable doubt of his guilt. I think that the two most important pieces of evidence that were proved faulty were the eye-witness statements. These were the only two pieces of evidence that weren’t purely circumstantial. So, even if the other evidence wasn’t discounted, these two should be enough to produce reasonable doubt.
D’Angelo may be suffering from a misconception of chance. Yes, it is highly unlikely that all of this evidence was faulty. But, there is always a possibility (and a likelihood) that a sequence will deviate from chance. Each piece of evidence should be, and rightfully was, examined on its own merits rather than simply concluded on based on chance and likelihood.
The exercise of the movie was to show us our prejudices in decision making. And now, with our lessons on heuristics and biases we could even relate the decision making processes of the jurors to the effect of representativeness, cognitive consistency, commitment, consensus, and central vs. peripheral route processing. I still commend the jurors for taking steps out of these traps to evaluate the evidence more thoroughly.
At the end of the day though, this was a movie. We were not privy to all of the evidence and proceedings that would have taken place in a real case. Yes, D’Angelo is right in the sense that it is highly unlikely that all of the possibilities the jurors discussed actually were the case. But, it is fiction. Sometimes it may be best to just appreciate the value and message of the movie rather than overanalyze every detail as if this was more than a work of fiction.
The author of the article, Mike D’Angelo, makes some very compelling points. Essentially, Mike states that there is almost too much evidence for the kid not to be guilty. The kid’s case also contains too many coincidences for it to seem realistic that he was not the one who murdered his father. Although, Mike D’Angelo’s general argument is very strong, I still have to disagree with him.
To begin with, the jury is charged with the duty of seeing if the kid is guilty without any shadow of doubt. The jury examines every piece of evidence, led by Henry Fonda, and finds that there is doubt with every piece of evidence presented. D’Angelo, by contrast, views the evidence as a combined entity. He puts the evidence in a contextual situation. Although it does seem convincing, D’Angelo’s argument does not address the situation that every piece of evidence presented before the jury had shadow’s of doubt. In some cases, the evidence is down-right flimsy. Eye witness testimony is an unstable form of evidence that this case relies too much on. Research has consistently found that eye witness testimony is not reliable to say the least (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/).
I am a strong supporter of the idea that everything should be put in context to create the situation. Context is an educational tool that helps somebody understand a specific situation. It gives you multiple angles to look at a case. D’Angelo does just that in his article, and I will admit, he makes it seem almost impossible for the kid not to be his dad’s murderer. However, D’Angelo cannot account for the fact that the evidence can in fact be dubious. If the evidence is in doubt, then you cannot convict the kid for murder. The “coincidences” that D’Angelo states may in fact be true, and the boy did murder his father. However, there is still doubt in said evidence. Therefore, the boy is let free by the jury because the evidence was not full proof.
I understand the author’s argument but ultimately I disagree with his overall conclusion of the film, 12 Angry Men. Yes, as D’Angelo argues, collectively evidence proves guilt but you can’t just look at evidence collectively. If every jury did that in every trial, there most likely would been many more innocent people convicted of crimes. Cases are tossed out all of the time because a piece of evidence proves to be invalid and it causes the entire case to collapse. Evidence A, B, and C, together might make someone guilty, but if Evidence A and C are looked at because B is not longer in evidence, all of the evidence looks different.
The job of the persecution is to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Which as discussed in deliberations by the jury of the film isn’t the case. Individually the evidence doesn’t hold up, which leaves the evidence open for deliberation and interpretation.
The film focuses entirely on the Kid being guilty or not guilty, but rarely, if ever argues his innocence. The job of the defense is to prove innocence and suggest alternative guilt. You could argue that D’Angelo has a point, that there are too many coincidences in the case. You can also argue that the film was an accurate representation of a jury deliberating and evaluating all of the evidence to determine if the Kid was guilty without a reasonable doubt. However, a more important argument against the film is that there’s nothing proving, or even suggesting the Kid’s innocence. The defense is rarely discussed, if only to say that he didn’t have a good defense lawyer. There were no alternative situations for how the father was murdered. There were no testimonies supporting the innocence of the Kid, or refuting the case of the prosecution.
As we first took a look at the techniques of the deliberation in the jury room and how emotion and other situations influenced the juror’s opinions and ability to deliberate, we have not yet looked at the that this was a one sided deliberation. The jurors were deliberating on the guilt of the Kid, which they couldn’t agree without reasonable doubt. Because of this, I disagree with D’Angelo’s claim that 12 Angry Men got it wrong but I do think that D’Angelo looking at the film from a different perspective is warranted because it lacks many characteristics that would make the situation believable for a real world court.
While watching the movie, there were certainly times where I would have sided with Mike D’Angelo. Just as D’Angelo said, there were clear instances where Henry Fonda was stretching the teeny-tiny-slight possibility that there was some flaw in some piece of evidence. For example, pushing back day before day before day in order to prove that one juror could not remember the exact name of the second feature film that he watched 4 days earlier. This was a bit of a stretch.
However, the standard of proof for a criminal conviction such as the one present here is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” And although the evidence might be viewed as a single unit, one, two, or three cracks in that that unit can be enough to prevent a juror from being convinced of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. D’Angelo ignores the fact that some of the strongest arguments can be completely destroyed by pointing out a single flaw in those arguments; likewise, a collection of evidence, although strong when viewed as a whole can fall apart when you bring up just one or two flaws.
The frequency on which all those occurrences happened does make it unlikely to be coincidence. It’s true!!! Most people would have been convicted for less. I guess D’Angelo just ruined a classic movie. I still believe in the message of the movie. I’m idealistic that way. Sometimes one person can make a difference. Generally, speaking it is better to allow a guilty man to go free than to kill an innocent one.
Although D’Angelo’s assessment is rather blunt and exaggerated, I think his overall point is possibly correct; the evidence did not prove that he was guilty, but nor did it prove that he was innocent. This is the strength of the judicial system–that someone cannot be convicted until proven guilty.
Indeed, it’s worth considering that Rose was not just being “inadvertent” and unwitting,” but was well aware of that the jurors “got it wrong.” It’s possible that one of the film’s intentions was to show the power Juror #8’s rationality in light of other jurors’ blind-sidedness, despite the fact that the defendant may have very well been guilty.
However, although I think D’Angelo makes a solid argument, I still don’t think looking at the evidence as a whole necessarily proves the defendant guilty. D’Angelo writes, “you cannot have that much damning evidence pointing at your guilt and still be innocent.” The author fails to recognize that this court case was taking place in a time in which racism was much more prevalent in the United States. Perhaps the witnesses all did have motives to manufacture evidence, since they may not have liked the kid because of his race.
I thought the article by Mr. D’Angelo was interesting and made me think about the deliberation in 12 Angry Men again, but I still feel as though they were correct. Mr. D’Angelo makes references to the OJ Simpson case, but I think that is a stretch of a comparison because of how much DNA played a role in OJ’s trial while The Kid in 12 Angry Men was believed guilty based mainly on what people thought they heard or saw. Eye witness testimony has proven to be unreliable and was the basis for the case against The Kid.
Mr. D’Angelo also references the knife that was used in the killing in 12 Angry Men, but in the movie they mention specifically that type of knife was able to be purchased right down the street from where The Kid lived. Without knowing the prevalence for people in the neighborhood to have a knife on them it is hard to know just how rare it is to be in possession of a switch blade or how common losing and buying a new knife would be.
As others have pointed out, the foundation of our judicial system is that you are guilty until proven innocent. When the evidence has holes in it, the defense has the obligation to exploit those holes in order to give the jury hesitation before convicting. The jury didn’t get anything wrong by not convicting The Kid, the prosecution did by not using the evidence they had in order to make a stronger case.
One of the biggest question after watching 12 Angry Men is, if the jurors made a mistake of possibly letting a person who might be guilty or not guilty go free.
In Mike D’Angelo’s article, he thinks that the evidence have been over assessed. To some extend I agree with him in that some incidences, for example, when the character Henry Fonda played pulled out the exact same switchblade as the one the boy supposedly used to kill his own father was questionable and dramatic at the same time. But, the other evidences, I thought, was correctly re-evluated by the jurors.
D’Angelo also used the analogy between the movie and the O.J. Simpson trial, which I thought was a bit of stretch. Considering the fact that the assessment of evidence during O.J. Simpson’s case was much more advance than the assessment of the evidence for the boy in the movie. If DNA was used in the 12 Angry Men, then, the outcome would’ve been different.
Therefore, I am not sure if I completely agree with Mike D’Angelo’s assessment of the movie. The truth is, neither Mike D’Angelo nor I will know the truth behind the crime. We can only offer up assumptions base on the evidence given and make a logical decision, and I think that is exactly what the jurors did in the movie.
While I do agree with Mike D’Angelo’s statement, I believe that the jurors did make the right decision. The law is based on the fact that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Henry Fonda after every point states that it is not the juror’s job to prove him innocent, but just show that there is a chance he is not guilty. While D’Angelo reminiscence about the coincidence behind two identical cab accidents does bring up a good point, it still does not justify how many potentially innocent people may be put away if evidence was not viewed independently.
The reading Judgment Under Uncertainty by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman talks about insensitivity to sample size’s as it concerns the representativeness heuristic. Specifically the study mentions that if a coin is tossed 6 times, people believe that the result of H-T-H-T-T-H is more likely than H-H-H-T-T-T. These results are statistically just as likely because every coin toss is independent. This should be the same idea when reviewing evidence.
If all of the evidence is not grossly true, it does not matter how many different pieces of evidence you have. D’Angelo states that the weight of all of the evidence combined creates a statistical advantage for the guilty voters. I disagree with this idea because if there is even a chance that the evidence is not accurate, it carries no weight.
I agree with the article in that yes, it is easy to pick apart each piece of evidence individually but when they are all put together, the probability that the kid is guilty is staggering. Though coincidences do happen, they are often rare and to have several occur on the same night the kids father was stabbed to death is, well, mathematically improbable.
Do I now think the kid is guilty? Yes, but do I think he should have been found guilty? Well under the law I do think that the prosecution did a poor job by leaving immense reasonable doubt and therefore the kid should have been found not guilty.
After reading Mr. D’Angelo’s article, I do not agree with his overall conclusion that the combined weight really leaves no room for doubt. While viewing the film 12 Angry Men, I did have some doubt on some of the evidence being reviewed. Although I do not think that the kid murdered his father, personally do not believe that he is a hundred percent innocent either.
In comparison to D’Angelo’s, I believe that when all pieces of evidence being reviewed some of them are very unlikely to happen. For instance, the kid lost his knife and the true murderer had a knife that was practically identically to the kid’s. And coincidentally, the murder used this knife to kill-a stranger-the kid’s father? That just does not add up. At the same time, I really do believe that the woman who claims she say the kid stab his father from the apartment across the L train platform could not have been wearing her glasses, as she slept, so I think this claim is true.
Overall, I think that both the movie and Mr. D’Angelo make reasonable claims about the kid’s innocent. Since I am not in position to determine which one is correct, I can only state my beliefs. I will never know if he truly did it or not. Similar to any controversial case, I can only review the evidence presented before me and make a decision based on what I believe is true.
Mr. D’Angelo makes some good points about what most who watch the film are thinking and despite his argument, I would still have found the boy not guilty. The driving force behind the argument of the jurors is reasonable doubt and the point is emphasized throughout the film. By going through each piece of evidence and analyzing it for validity and clarity, the jury is able to get a better understanding of what might have actually occurred.
One of the strongest pieces of evidence used in the trial is eye witness testimony. Carefully recalling certain attributes about each of the eye witnesses, the jurors are able to pick apart their testimony and rule them out as evidence of reasonable doubt. This is not to say that the way in which the men analyzed the evidence was not far reaching but in any case gave them some reason to discount them from the trial. Looking at each piece of evidence in the way D’Angelo does provides some reason to believe the boy may be guilty but does not address some of the inconsistences in the eye witness testimony.
Looking at the evidence, D’Angelo puts the pieces together collectively and in a contextual frame. Although I feel this is helpful for understanding the big picture; looking at each individual piece is important when there is more than one actor involved. The eye witness testimony and the other pieces of evidence come into play from different perspectives and therefore, should be treated as independent of one another when analyzed for validity in the case.
Although the jury’s examination of the evidence is by no means scientific, there are many coincidences in the evidence presented, and there are certain assumptions made about the case, at the end of it there is even just the smallest reason for doubt. For this reason only, the boy should be found not guilty.
Reginald Rose’s movie, 12 Angry Men, has given rise to a slew of arguments about whether or not justice was served. The movie clearly portrays how even a shadow of doubt could let a defendant be acquitted even if other evidence make it possible to confidently convict the individual. Moreover, in order for a sentence or conviction to be made, the decision should be unanimous among the jurors on the panel. However, one particular jury boldly steps forward to voice his doubt which ended up saving the defendant. D’Angelo clearly explains how the jurors have gone wrong and how each piece of evidence could be defective without their knowledge, while considered together, there’s no reasonable doubt.
The evidences chosen were cherry-picked very skillfully and effectively that they were able to convince even experienced jurors that the individual was guilty. It is the policy of the law not to convict any innocent individual and that’s the reason jury trials are allowed for criminal cases. However, jurors are carried away by the tactful and convincing speeches of the advocates and the same has happened in the case of 12 Angry Men. Also, the jury is always busy with several trials and seldom takes such a long time to decide on a case. However, Henry Fonda has proved to be different and D’Angelo has artfully brought up the reasons why Fonda could be right and how seeing the evidences in the new light of doubts expressed by Fonda would change the case upside down. Each of Fonda’s doubts seem genuine when considered for individual evidences, however, when the collective scenario presented by the evidences is considered, there’s no reasonable doubt that one could get. Yet, articulating the case in such a way as done by the advocate and presenting the evidences that strongly support the conviction of the individual could be powerful enough to get an individual labeled convict if jurors like Fonda don’t speak up and express their doubts.
While I understand the argument that the author is making, I still believe that the kid is not guilty. The author states that the kid has to be guilty because it is unrealistic to have so many coincidences. He goes on to say that it is plausible that one piece of evidence was a coincidence, but to say that all of it is would be irrational. However, I think that the author is missing one very important point. Who’s to say that the evidence that the jurors were presented with was all the evidence? If we knew for sure that that was all the evidence, it wouldn’t be too hard to agree with the author. The evidence that the jurors were provided with came from the plaintiff’s attorney. The goal of the plaintiff is to give the kid a death sentence. It makes perfect sense for them to pick and choose the evidence that helps their case, and twist around or eliminate completely the evidence that doesn’t. It is very easy to cherry-pick evidence to see what you want to see. No one ever wants to prove that they’re wrong, so if something is found that goes against one’s belief, they may find a way to discount it. I’m sure that there is plenty of evidence that proves that the kid was indeed not guilty, but it is nowhere to be found.
In addition, I think that many of the jurors wanted to believe that the kid was guilty. This brings in the idea of confirmation bias. Their past experiences and biases led them to this conclusion before deliberation. The kid was from a bad neighborhood, and hearing that he shouted “I’m going to kill you” at his father only helped lead them to believe that he was a bad kid. They believed he was guilty, and so they only saw what confirmed their assumption and were blind to anything else.
His assessment is convincing, but irrelevant. Allow me to perform some irrational thinking as I demonstrate some confirmation bias and show what a cognitive miser I can be; I refuse to admit my initial conclusions were wrong – watch out Juror No. 3, I’m going to give you a run for your money!
Let me start with D’Angelo’s assertion that we are supposed to consider the combined weight of the evidence. Says who? When the judge instructs the jury to make a decision through preponderance of evidence, they never say look at it as a whole not in parts (at least that was not stated to me when I served as a juror- or possible I don’t recall). Again, the jury process is kind of a joke when it comes to instructions as you are asking 12 people with absolutely no formal training either in the process or theory of jurisprudence to evaluate evidence. They are bound to take whatever strategy they see fit in there. In this particular case, they came to a conclusion because of the machinations of the overly calm and rational Henry Fon…er, Juror No. 8. Once they made a decision – whether it’s what happened or not – is legally the conclusion of the jurors.
Sure, the way D’Angelo sums up the holes in the evidence may convince others that The Kid was guilty (I’ll admit my jaw dropped when I finished his bulleted presentation). But D’Angelo wasn’t there to counter Juror No. 8. In the end, the Jurors did the best job they could in summing up their points of view on the evidence and were all convinced that it was to flimsy enough for a Not Guilty. And that’s really all that mattered.
His assessment is convincing but only when the validity of this group of evidence can all be assured. At the very beginning of the deliberation, many of the 11 jurors who voted for “guilty” are influenced by their existing attitude. They tended to believe that the boy is guilty because he was born in the slum. Therefore when evidence was presented to them, they were more likely to overlook the loopholes of the evidence. If the validity of evidence is in question, no matter how many pieces of evidence collectively are towards to the probability of the boy being guilty, the evidence is not solid enough to judge the boy being “guilty.”
The reasonable doubt is to ensure that no one who is innocent will be judged “guilty,” but not to ensure that no one who is guilty will be judged “not guilty.” “Cherry picking” a group of one-sided evidence can be very easy. The jurors should rely on their reasoning process to critically examine the evidence. Making a quick judgment just based on a great number of pieces of evidence presented while denying the reasonable doubt can be risky.
I think that Mike D’Angelo argument is convincing but jurors are not D’Angelo in that they know all of this information and can do what he does. Jurors are ordinary citizens who use their biases, and education to make the decisions that they make. D’Angelo maybe be right that the kid killed his father but the point of a jury to to find see if there is reasonable doubt because the burden of proof is on the prosecution and if there are holes in the evidence, as there was, then the jurors were right to make the decision that they did which was not guilty. When D’Angelo says that how the kid losing his knife the day his father was murdered “alone convicts him” is wrong because D’Angelo was not at the scene when this happened and shows how D’Angelo’s confirmation bias comes into play. His bias of thinking that since the kid lost his knife and how he yelled about killing his dad makes him guilty is flawed. D’Angelo forgets that there are other evidences that prove the kids innocence and even with the mentioned evidence, there are holes which makes D’Angelo argument about the guilt of the kid flawed. Comparing OJ Simpsons with 12 angry men is totally different because of the different environment and what we know happened in OJ case does not make it true for every case. Also OJ Simpson was a real case and 12 angry men in a Hollywood movie which must be taken into account.
There seem to be a few points of law that D’Angelo missed, namely, what “reasonable doubt” means, and also that it is up to the prosecution to prove guilt, not the defense to prove innocence. Innocent is never a finding of law – the Kid was found not guilty, and that is an important distinction.
Black’s Law Dictionary defines reasonable doubt as “satisfied to a moral certainty”. The legal system renders imperfect judgment by imperfect people in an imperfect system – and hence the ambiguous and subjective standard and the unfair advantage on the defense side. The question is, for this fictional jury, how do they individually and then collectively determine what is reasonable? Perhaps, if any one piece of evidence or (notoriously unreliable) eyewitness testimony had held up under scrutiny, it might have been a closer judgment call for some jurors to satisfy their “moral certainty”. For example, if Juror 8 hadn’t wandered around and bought the knife, perhaps the physical evidence wouldn’t have been called into question, and then it would have been a question of weighing some stronger evidence (knife) against some weaker evidence (eyewitnesses). I also think that D’Angelo gives people too much credit for not putting their thumb on the scale during an investigation – perhaps nowadays we are too willing to believe police corruption theories, but as he himself pointed out, if the police possibly planted some evidence in the OJ trial, why could they not have done the same for this poor Kid? Or coerced witnesses? Etc.
D’Angelo is also trying this Kid in the court of public opinion – forgetting that one of the principles of the legal system and the rationale that governs it is that whatever the finding of the court is, that is justice. It is judgment; it is final (after a fashion – the system corrects even for this by allowing appeals).
I believe that Mr. D’Angelo, with all due respect, is simply wrong in totality here. He makes a good point about taking in the combined weight of evidence at hand, and is right about certain smaller points in particular (such as when he discusses Fonda’s character reproducing a similar knife to the one found in the crime scene). However, he simply forgets that the point of a criminal trial is for the prosecutor to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty of a crime. Holes were poked in the prosecutor’s case, and doubt, in the course of the movie, was very much so established. The prosecutor ultimately failed at firmly establishing the guilt of the accused, and so the jury, after a lengthy process of examining the facts at hand, had little choice but to find the defendant not guilty.
Mike D’Angelo almost had me convinced that The Kid was definitely guilty. Almost, but not quite. I still believe that there was not enough proof to convince me, had I been a juror, to be certain of The Kid’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Sure it was a possibility, but it also could have been a possibility that one of the jurors killed the kid’s father. Anything is possible! I think D’Angelo is exhibiting some heuristic properties that occur naturally when humans are faced with a complex decision. He really feels that his opinion of guilt is valid because he has oversimplified the analysis of the evidence. The Kid is not definitely innocent, nor is he definitely guilty, which is why I still agree with the verdict at the end of the movie.
To start with, is there always sufficient evidence to prove a crime? If not, it is always difficult to prove whether someone has committed a crime. In my opinion, it is important whether there is enough evidence. If not, I think it doesn’t matter about “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”. Mr. A’nagelo established the point that the kid might be guilty by combining a set of evidence together joined by ‘And’. The weakness of this approach is if any single evidence can be proved as wrong, the whole set of evidence become void. On the other hand, the approach Henry Fonda took or saying in general, it is also possible to prove the set of evidence separately to be wrong and hence come up with a conclusion that the kid is not guilty. The bottom line is, if the kid is not guilty then who killed his father? My point is, the both approach can be correct depending on the situation and evidence under consideration. There can be cases when to combine weight of all the evidence can be an efficient way to solve the problem, and there are cases where people have to depend on a single piece of strong evidence.
About this particular case I will go with the fact that the kid is innocent which is against Mr. D’Angelo’s assertions. Although he has come up with the combined weight of the evidence, still it does not prove that the kid killed his father. It’s like saying that so many things cannot be wrong at the same time, whereas in real world of probability, it might happen. On the other hand, the approach how the evidence was proved wrong individually, seem correct to me, hence the verdict that the kid is innocent was the right one. But what happen, if the kid really killed his father but set free by the jury? In that case, I will refer to how I started this discussion. Verdict is given based on evidence, if evidence is weak, justice may not be served. But for the system’s sake, that how it is done.
While I’d like to more readily agree with D’Angelo, I don’t think I’m able to. The fact is, this exactly what trials are for. The prosecution and defense are entitled to present radically different interpretations of events, and manipulate evidence to support their claim. Unfortunately, in “12 Angry Men” we have to accept that the defense attorney was really lousy, so it was all up to Henry Fonda to present the complicated alternative point of view. I have no issue with the idea presented in the film that all of the pieces of evidence could be seen differently. In fact, I would fully expect that of a legitimate trial. I only take issue with the fact that this whole alternative reality is presented at the 11th hour by a juror, who technically isn’t qualified to do so.
After reading D’Angelo’s article, I have to agree that the kid was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. As viewers, we commit cognitive biases that lead us all to believe that the defendant is not guilty. The very structure of the film presents Henry Fonda as a sensitive likable character in search of the truth, this in stark contrast to the opposition, who are prejudice and in stockbroker’s case, out of touch with the mainstream. As an audience, we want Fonda to win, and we in turn convince ourselves that his points are right.
After taking a moment to go over all the evidence as D’Angelo does, it is crazy not to see the defendant’s guilt. It may be true that there is some doubt to individual pieces of evidence, but when weighted together the evidence is overwhelmingly. When D’Angelo lists all the things that have to be true for the defendant to be not guilty, the odds are over a million to one. A million to one odds does not meet the standard of a reasonable doubt. As D’Angelo points out the witnesses alibi is very suspect and is not analogous to the situation presented to the stockbroker. After reading D’Angelos’s article, I can see how a jury found O.J. not guilty, because if they saw this film, they too would cherry pick the facts, and in turn hold the standard of conviction at certainty, when it is beyond a reasonable doubt.
D’ Angelo makes a great argument by pointing out that single proof of evidence can lead to a guilty verdict but once they are put together they do not last and fall apart. But the jurors in Twelve Angry Men got it right all for the right reasons. Juror number eight used the problem of proof needed to the prove guilt. Whether or not juror number eight was conscious of the standard of evidence required to authorize a criminal persuasion in the court case or whether or not the proof was beyond a reasonable doubt, he had doubt and questioned himself. With this doubt he was able to question each piece of proof and help his supporter jurors in asking themselves could they distrust the evidence that was displayed to them. So whether or not the young boy was guilty the liability of evidence was finally not met for the juror to get a guilty vote from each juror.