![]() ![]() ![]() Had he not felt such sympathy, he might not have held out, which shows that people can be prejudiced in their insistence on lack of prejudice too. Juror Eight’s insistence on the jury’s right and duty to investigate the evidence might seem at first like a rational, principled insistence on justice and due process, yet it is founded on his gut sympathy for the teenage defendant. To start with, each juror has a different take on his civic duty: some cherish it in the abstract as an American ideal, some are attached to it because of their personal experience of injustice, and many just want to come to a verdict so that they can get home fast. The men are anything but dispassionate when the deliberation process reveals their irrationalities and biases and makes them confront them. ![]() Instead, from its opening moments, it shows how both the juror’s motivations and their conceptions of justice are influenced, not entirely rationally or even consciously, by their personalities and experiences. A simple representation of the criminal justice system might be named Twelve Serious Men, and portray those men as diligently, rationally, and single-mindedly going through the evidence until they uncover the facts that reveal what actually happened between the son and his father on the night of the murder. Yet the play does not represent either the American criminal justice system or the abstract concept of justice as simple or clear. As a play portraying the deliberations of a jury in a murder trial, Twelve Angry Men is naturally concerned with the idea of justice. ![]()
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