12 Angry Men

12 Angry Men Essay

When a crime is commited a person is innocent until proven guilty. The fate of the person on trial is decided by jurors who go over evidence thoroughly. They use reasonable doubt when deciding if the person is not guilty from the look of the evidence. The play “12 Angry Men” written by Reginald Rose. In this play a young man is on trial for the murder of his father. 12 jurors go over the facts of this case to find whether the son is guilty or not guilty. In the play 12 Angry Men by Reginald Rose the boy is innocent of murdering his father because the witnesses are not reliable, the knife used, and how the father was killed.

The witnesses were not that reliable because they were older and some of their information was proven to be false. The old man said that he had heard the boy scream i'm going to kill you and then heard a body fall, he said 15 seconds after he heard the body fall he looked out the door and saw the boy running down the stairs. “And the old cripple swore, on his oath, that it was fifteen”. (Rose 42). This was proven to be false because they did a test where they walked as slow as the old man, to the door in his house. There test results showed that it would have actually taken him somewhere around 40 seconds to a minute based off how slow he walks.

The old lady across the street said she was laying in bed trying to fall asleep and a passing el train was going by, which through the window of it she saw the murder take place and said she saw the son do it. They proved this to be wrong because the old lady had really bad vision and wears glasses. She doesn't sleep with glasses on, so she would not been able to actually tell it was the boy killing his