I don’t see that as evidence against it being “unusual”, it’s only evidence against it being impossible or difficult to find. It’s not really important though, as long as not everyone was carrying that exact type of knife, and I think that’s still a safe assumption.
What also makes it difficult is that I think this was a pretty cool moment for Fonda, who is generally very likeable. As are all the people who support innocence early on. For instance the immigrant, who asks the other guy if he knows what “reasonable doubt” means. Alas, it’s the affable immigrant who doesn’t know what reasonable doubt means, at least in cases with several independent corroborating factors.
On the other hand many of the people who support guilt are loud, abrasive, racist and / or assholes. That doesn’t make the kid innocent though.
The risk of a domestic argument turning murder is also very low. Hell, a botched burglary is probably MORE likely to turn to murder.
I was under the impression that that particular model of knife was suggested to be very common among tough kids at the time, the idea being pretty much all the kids in the neighborhood would have had one.
But even if the murder weapon was the defendant’s, there would still be a perfectly reasonable explanation: he simply forgot it at home. Someone else entered the residence, things turned ugly, the murderer grabbed the knife which was probably immediately visible on a table somewhere and in the heat of the moment stabbed the victim. No need for elaborate theories about how the knife changed hands on the street. Hell, rather than say the dropped knife was a suspicious coincidence, you could argue that him leaving the knife behind was the main reason the encounter turned lethal in the first place. If the defendant hadn’t left the knife behind, the victim would have most likely just gotten a beating by the intruder rather than be killed.
Is it the most likely account of events? No, it isn’t. But it is very plausible and more than enough for reasonable doubt. The most likely account is still that the defendant did it, but when you chip away at the prosecution’s case it becomes readily apparent there is no corroborating evidence that wouldn’t also support this alternate theory of the crime. A more rigorous prosecution could have potentially ruled out any other reasonable possibility, but they simply failed to do so and it is absolutely crucial that we give the benefit of the doubt to the defendant in such instances.
edit: Thinking about it slightly more, could someone recall the timeline with regards to how long after the argument between the defendant and the father the murder took place? I seem to recall there being a pretty long gap.
The impression I got was that when the prosecution said that the knife was distinctive, they were just plain outright wrong, that it was in fact quite a common knife.
Also, it’s not necessary to show that any given alternate theory of the crime is plausible. All that’s necessary is to show that all alternate theories combined are plausible. Yeah, it’s a real stretch to say that someone else found the defendant’s knife just as he happened to be heading to the defendant’s house… But maybe the murderer found it in the house, or maybe the murderer already had a knife just like it, or maybe the murderer was trying to frame the defendant and deliberately got a knife just like his, or maybe it really was the defendant’s knife but the police botched the evidence and misidentified it as the murder weapon, and so on. If any of those theories is correct, it doesn’t matter which one, then the defendant is innocent.
Well maybe it wasn’t premeditated murder. Maybe it was burglary gone wrong. It was pretty unsafe neighborhood. And if doors were unlocked or opened, there would be no signs of breaking and entry.
Yes, that’s true, and a good point. But I don’t think any of the alternative theories are likely at all.
Lets say the murderer had one just like it (odds say 1-100), and the kid lost his knife independently on the exact same evening (odds 1-100), and both the witnesses were mistaken (odds say 1-10), and he had watched a movie, just couldn’t remember the title of it (1-3)
Then lets look at another option that you mention: The murderer found it in the house. Why did he then use it to kill the old man? Lets say its a burglary gone wrong (odds 1-10) and he founds the knife the kid dropped in the apartment (odds 1-2), and the kid dropped his knife in the apartment the very night of the burglary (odds 1-100), and both the witnesses were mistaken (odds say 1-10), and he had watched a movie, just couldn’t remember the title of it (1-3)
So the odds of option 1 are a combined 300,000 to 1, while the odds of option 2 are a combined 60,000. So if you add those two up, plus some other equally or more unlikely options, you still don’t get anything that isn’t extremely unlikely.
I think an option that gives us something more likely is if the defendant was being framed. But that was never brought up as an option in the movie. And you can’t acquit someone just because of a hypothetical possibility that they are being framed, again if you did, you would have to acquit practically everyone. The same goes for if you don’t consider that, if you want to be certain of guilt in excess of, say, 1 / 20,000, then you can practially never convict anyone.
Certainly, my point was just that if you took an isolated incident of domestic argument and a burglary, the latter if more likely to turn violent. mr. jp asserted that burglary is unlikely to turn violent, and so a theory of the crime incorporating it doesn’t constitute reasonable doubt. Given that one of the key pieces of evidence against the defendant is that he got in an argument with the victim, it’s reasonable to point out that the vast majority of arguments do not, in fact, turn violent. If we’re willing to allow that someone else could have entered the residence (and this is a possibility the prosecution certainly should have addressed, there certainly could have been evidence one way or the other with a proper investigation) then it’s also reasonably possible that the encounter turned violent. It’s not reasonable to condemn the defendant because he had an argument with the victim and then reject another possibility with a high chance of violence.
No it isn’t. The prosecutor’s fallacy would be if I said: “Only 5% of the people living in the neighbourhood have this knife, therefore there is 95% chance the son is guilty.”
What Im doing is just considering all the evidence together, instead of each by itself in a vacuum, as the movie did.
Anyone can assign probabilities they pull out of thin air to prove anything. I will now prove that the boy killing his father was highly unlikely:
It’s stated that the boy was regularly beaten by his father since he was quite young, so the odds of him deciding out of the blue to kill his father over it are about, say, 1-in-1000. The odds of him both wiping the knife clean of fingerprints and fleeing in a panic must be 1-in-500. The odds of him returning to the apartment later that night are 1-in-100. The odds of an experienced knife-fighter using an overhand stab are 1-in-100. There, he couldn’t have been the killer.
The problems with ignoring flaws in the inculpatory evidence, and flatly ignoring exculpatory evidence, as the AV Club writer did, should be obvious.
IIRC part of the “evidence” was the kid threw his movie ticket away so he had no alibi. I was watching Mystery Detectives this weekend and part of the “evidence” was the suspect held on to his the movie ticket. The detective was like “Who the f**k holds on to a movie ticket unless they know they need an alibi.”
My opinion is that in 12 Angry Men, the police tried to frame a guilty person and because of it he was acquitted, just like real-life with the OJ.
I wonder if you realize how this view affects every single trial without a straight-up confession? In reality the evidence is never 100%, it’s always at most highly likely that the accused did it. And if in every case, you will set up a number of probabilities similar to the above, say that is equally unlikely, and then let the accused go free, then practically everyone goes free.
It’s not highly likely that the accused did it, in the 12 Angry Men case.
Trying to calculate probabilties based on invented odds is a poor approach, whether it is to demonstrate guilt or innocence (or anything else, frankly). Dull as it may seem, only by weighing all evidence, both in a vacuum and as a collective, against a standard of reasonable doubt can something like justice be acheived.
This case fails to meet that standard. The mere improbability of a person being killed with the same model of knife that was purchased and lost by their son earlier in the day isn’t enough, and that’s all the prosecution has.
I’m reminded of a scene from Law & Order where Jack McCoy(played by Sam Waterson) says “the standard is ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ not 'absolute certainty”.
Of course the problem comes down to the fact that I’m not sure where the line between “beyond reasonable doubt” ends and “absolute certainty” begins.
I will agree with the comparisons to the OJ case.
Much was made of the infamous “Bruno Maglias” but frankly the odds of OJ being so unlucky that someone who also owned such rare shoes murdered his wife is far higher than the odds that someone with an identical looking switchblade(it had a intricate and nearly unique design on it) to the kid’s killing the kid’s father just hours after the kid lost the knife.
Frankly, if we were to apply the standards of the film it strikes me that it would be nearly impossible to convict anyone. After all, videos can be faked, can we ever know beyond all shadow of a doubt that a witness isn’t lying or mistaken. Evidence can always be faked and even things like ballistics, DNA analysis, and fingerprint analysis is rarely 100%.
For that matter even in cases of a straight up confession can we say beyond a shadow of a doubt the person isn’t confessing to cover for someone or because they were browbeaten into doing so by the police or because they were fooled into thinking the case was so strong against them they had no chance of being found not guilty so they might as well throw themselves on the mercy of the court and hope their cooperation buys them a lighter sentence.
The thing with the knife is already a really strong piece of evidence, and it was not the only thing the prosecution had. It also had an eye-witness to the murder, that the accused had a bad alibi, and an eye-witness to the accused running down the stairs. None of these pieces of evidence were tight, as was shown in the movie, but neither were they dismissed.
The calculations with the odds in numbers is a poor approach, but it was just a bad attempt by me to put into numbers how unlikely it is that the accused murderer randomly loses the murder weapon on the same day that the murder is comitted with an identical weapon.
In the end, if all this corroborative evidence isn’t enough, then nothing is enough. Eye-witnesses can’t be trusted (they probably just lie to get attention), murder weapons can’t be trusted (it’s reasonably possible that they were just lost from the accused at the exact time of the murder), the accused having an unlikely story of where he was at the time doesn’t matter (it could be true), all these things pointing to the same guy and nothing pointing to anyone else doesn’t matter. I challenge you to look at 10 random convictions and not find that they should be set free also, using these criteria.
The prosecution put on the stand the owner of a store who sold the kid the knife just a few weeks before and that owner said he’d never seen another knife with a design on the handle like that.
Fonda’s character managed to find another store where he bought one with the same design on the handle and said the store had others in stock.
In short, the knife’s design wasn’t quite as unique as originally believed, but it was hardly common.
I’m reminded of the testimony regarding OJ’s gloves. The owner of the company testified that those particular model gloves in those size were extremely rare and they had a credit card receipt showing OJ had purchased one of them.
Of course the alternate theories of the murder describe unlikely circumstances. All theories of any murder always describe unlikely circumstances. This is true because murders really aren’t all that common. To get the full picture, you need to find the conditional probabilities, on the condition that we know that someone was actually murdered.
The knife is a piece of evidence, yes. The others, not so much. The “eyewitness” to the murder was, as the jury realized, nothing of the sort: It depended on the eyesight of someone who normally wears glasses but wasn’t at the time, looking through two home windows and two windows of a moving train at night under poor lighting conditions. About all that that’s evidence for is that the murderer was humanoid. And the poor alibi is absolutely not evidence for the prosecution, at all. What it is is really weak evidence for the defense. But nobody is ever obligated to provide an alibi, at all.
Neither witness was credible. The woman wore glasses, and wouldn’t have had them on when she made her supposed identification of the accused with a fleeting glimpse through the windows of a moving train.
The old man’s testimony was actually physically impossible. Not only did he claim to have been able to run from his bed to the door before the killer ran down one flight of stairs (despite being unable to move one leg), he also claimed to have been able to hear, and identify, a shout over the sound of the passing train. Lastly, his testimony of the killer fleeing in a mad dash is totally at odds with the knife having been wiped clean of fingerprints.
Having an unverifiable alibi isn’t inculpatory evidence. A solid alibi would be exculpatory, but there’s nothing remarkable about a ticket-seller at a theater failing to recall a given customer, or someone in an emotionally-charged state failing to recall the films he saw, in the era in which 12 Angry Men takes place.
Against this, we must balance the evidence for the defense: the knife wasn’t rare; the victim was a violent career criminal who lived in an awful neighborhood, both of which make his being killed by someone other than his son entirely plausible; the lack of motive; and the accused returned to the scene of the crime much later that night, which is consistent with a young man who left the house after a fight and planned to slink back in when his father was asleep, and not at all consistent with someone who screamed at and killed his father before fleeing in a panic (albeit a panic that set in after cleaning up the crime scene).
[QUOTE=mr. jp]
The calculations with the odds in numbers is a poor approach, but it was just a bad attempt by me to put into numbers how unlikely it is that the accused murderer randomly loses the murder weapon on the same day that the murder is comitted with an identical weapon.
[/quote]
Unlikely, sure, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Without credible evidence independent of that one coincidence, it’s not nearly enough to convict on.
[QUOTE=mr. jp]
In the end, if all this corroborative evidence isn’t enough, then nothing is enough. Eye-witnesses can’t be trusted (they probably just lie to get attention), murder weapons can’t be trusted (it’s reasonably possible that they were just lost from the accused at the exact time of the murder), the accused having an unlikely story of where he was at the time doesn’t matter (it could be true), all these things pointing to the same guy and nothing pointing to anyone else doesn’t matter. I challenge you to look at 10 random convictions and not find that they should be set free also, using these criteria.
[/QUOTE]
This evidence isn’t enough, because this evidence is not credible, as I outlined above. That’s not true of all evidence, it’s true of this evidence.