A Film for Our Time

The jurors take a break in 12 Angry Men

On the hottest day of the year, the trial of an eighteen year old boy for the murder of his father concludes--the jurors withdraw for deliberations, tasked with determining whether the defendant is guilty. If they agree, a death sentence will be handed down. The case seems an easy one, with the jury ready to reach a verdict in less than five minutes of deliberation, but one juror is not convinced. Over the objections of the others, he demands a recounting of the evidence presented, arguing that surely a man's life is worth more than a few moments' thought. Over the course of several hours, the jurors weigh the evidence of the case, and with it weightier issues of class, justice in the United States, and the intersection of the two. 12 Angry Men remains relevant to us as we continue to deal with these issues nearly sixty years after the film's release.

The great strength of the film lies in the fact that only two of the jurors are ever given names, and those only at the very end of the film. When they are referred to at all, it is by their juror number. Among them are figures we recognize immediately--there is the easy-going jokester, the highly-rational academic man, the small business owner just wanting to finish the task of being a juror and get back to work, the hardworking immigrant, and the angry, loud law and order man obsessed with disciplining "those people." They all have their reasons for assuming that the defendant is guilty, and each one has their reasons, and their biases, challenged. The style of filming, with its focus, occasionally close up, on the faces of the jurors, allows us to see some as they change their mind as the reliability of the prosecution's case is challenged. There is shock, and occasionally tears, as the jurors realize that they were ready to blithely send a young man off to die on the testimony of what turn out to be unreliable witnesses. 

This question remains sadly relevant; just as the jurors in 12 Angry Men became convinced of the unreliability of the witnesses in the case, in recent years science has also demonstrated that our justice system relies too greatly on witness testimony--to the detriment of many innocent men and women sentenced to prison on similarly unreliable testimony. The questions that the jurors raise related to the performance of the defense attorney also feel too relevant. While Henry Fonda's character raises multiple objections to the testimony of the witnesses, other jurors question why the defense attorney didn't raise them. The answer, in part, is that the lawyer was likely a state-appointed one, who cared little for the fate of his client. The question remains whether justice can truly be considered to have been done when the law treats poorer clients so differently than those with the means to afford their own lawyer. This seems especially true given the fact that, in certain cases (like eviction from a rental property) the courts have determined that defendants do not, in fact, have the right to an attorney, as Matthew Desmond relates in his new book on the subject. The larger question of whether it is better to wrongly sentence an innocent man than take a chance that the guilty will walk free still appears in our discussions of the criminal justice system in this country. 

Questions of class overshadow the film, with different jurors arguing that the defendant, born and raised in a slum, was little better than an animal, that those born in such a situation are more likely to be violent and, in the estimation of one juror, deserve no mercy whatsoever. These sentiments find an uncanny echo in some of the rhetoric surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, among those who attack the movement and attempt to justify the killings by police of unarmed suspects. One of the jurors additionally expresses an anti-immigrant sentiment in a heated moment. In spite of sixty years of progress, we are just as likely to hear anti-immigrant and anti-poor rhetoric today, no less misguided than it was then. In the minds of many, poverty remains synonymous with criminality and vice.

While raising many questions, the film doesn't explicitly answer them. If anything, however, the guiding principles of Fonda's character do point the way to implicit answers, leaning towards justice and mercy, a justice that eschews prejudice and embraces true fairness in meting out judgment, a justice that prefers logical analysis of fact as opposed to a hot-headed race to the hangman's noose. Was the accused guilty? What exactly constitutes reasonable doubt in a jury setting? Because it raises these questions and more, issues that we continue to grapple with, 12 Angry Men remains a film worth seeing.