12 Angry Men: The kid definitely did it!

Cafe Society
1

I just finished watching 12 Angry Men today (stop reading if you don’t want a 50 year old movie spoiled) and spent the rest of the evening thinking about it and I’ve come to a conclusion: The kid definitely did it.

Ignore the eyewitness testimony for the time being, instead focus on the question: If the kid didn’t do it, who did?

What we know is the following:

  • The father is dead
  • The kid bought a switchblade some days prior
  • A switchblade, similar or identical to the one the kid bought was the cause of death
  • The kid no longer has his switchblade in his possession

All of these facts are agreed upon by both the defense and the prosecution by the time the jury commences.

Additionally, the kid alleges that:

  • He went to the movies around 10pm.
  • The switchblade slipped out of his pocket sometime between 10 and 3
  • He was not the one to murder his father.

So the question remains, “who could have possibly killed the father”?

As far as I can see, there are 3 possibilities:

  1. It was a pre-mediated assassination. Someone pickpocketed the kid on the way to the movies, with the express intention of using the kid as a patsy. They killed the father out of some other motivation and left the murder weapon at the scene specifically to set up the kid. If the defense believed that this may have been the case, then it’s the defense’s job to bring up evidence of it. Given that the jurors never talk about this scenario, we can assume that the defence never tried to make this case.

The problem is that this cannot be the basis for reasonable doubt. The reason being, if it were allowed, then no verdict could be returned as guilty because for any trial, it’s always possible to come up with a scenario where the defendant was set up. It has to be up to the defense to provide evidence that such a scenario is plausible or it cannot be considered.

Plus, murders simply don’t happen that way. Real life isn’t some murder mystery novel. The father was some poor nobody living in a slum. He didn’t have any great and powerful enemies, nobody’s going to bother planning such an elaborate scheme.

  1. The kid is lying, the events proceeded much as the 11 jurors imagined it did at the beginning of the trial and the kid is guilty. As the recalcitrant juror kept on statingThere’s nothing that was brought up that makes it impossible for the kid to be the murderer, simply things that make it not a sure thing.

So sure, the eye witnesses could have been wrong and the knife angle could have been funny but the kid could have still killed the father exactly as the jurors imagined.

  1. The last option is that this was all a fantastical coincidence and the events proceeded largely as the kid described. But for that to be the case, it must have been a truly marvellous set of coincidental circumstances to have occurred. How many times has something “slipped out of your pocket” without you noticing it? Especially something as heavy as a switch blade? For me, that’s maybe happened 3 or 4 times in my life.

And then it happened on the exact night that your father gets murdered by a random stranger? Sure, it might be a rough neighbourhood but murder does not happen every day.

And then the murder is done not by a gun or a club or a normal knife, but by a switchblade? And not just any switchblade, but the exact same make and model the kid just bought (which, while not completely unique, is certainly uncommon)? What are the chances of all of these different things coming together?

Sure, there’s the famous saying that it’s better to let 10 guilty men go free than wrongly put away an innocent man but this coincidence isn’t a 10:1 chance or a 100:1 chance, it’s a many trillions to 1 chance. It’s the “a dog ate my homework” excuse, multiplied by itself 3 times over. And again, it can’t possibly be the basis for a reasonably doubt because, again, any trial could be alternately explained by a series of coincidences.

So again, focusing on the question of “if not the kid, who else could have murdered the father” and there simply isn’t any good answer. That the kid did it and constructed the dopiest “dog ate my homework” excuse possible is the only option that’s not absurd. I simply don’t see any way to absolve the kid of this crime.

2

Previous discussions here, here, and here.

3

Of course the kid id it.
That’s not the point of the movie.

4

Anyone who says “of course the kid did it” pretty clearly missed the whole point of the movie.

5

That point being: jury duty really sucked before air conditioning.

6

Yes, and who would have paid to go see 12 Sweaty Men?

7

The Gay Men’s Chorus for their weekly Movie Night?

8

Whoa… Jack Warden as a gay icon?

9

De gustibus. I don’t judge.

10

I fully agree with the OP (as can probably be seen in the links.) He put it better than I did though.

I also don’t think “that’s not the point of the movie” saves it. What is the point of the movie then? That we should let everyone go free if there is a shadow of a doubt? That jury bullying is bad (but only when done early in the jury process, not later)?

That said, I still liked the movie.

11

Yeah I remember those, I was surprised to learn this wasn’t a revived zombie thread.

12

For me, the standard is not “he probably did it”, it’s “he did it beyond a reasonable doubt”.

The prosecution can’t prove it was the kid’s switchblade (and let’s be honest, how good was forensics in the 1950s that they could tell it was a switchblade over a kitchen knife?), I can’t imagine switchblades were all that uncommon in those days, the kid has an alibi which the prosecution has done nothing to disprove, and people lose switchblades all the time. I would think if the kid actually did it, he would rather clean and keep his switchblade (being poor, why would he toss it, and being young, why would he think to toss it?).

There’s plenty of reasonable doubt here. The whole movie is about how you shouldn’t jump to conclusions and include your own biases in the case. Seems the OP missed the point of the movie.

13

The last three are circumstantial and were addressed in trial.

That’s not what the jury should be asking themselves at all. It is not their job to convict the most likely candidate, it’s their job to assess whether the evidence available proves beyond reasonable doubt the kid did it.

Reginald Rose surely intended the kid to be innocent or this drama wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever.

14

I think these are some really weak injections compared to the evidence against him. His “alibi” was that he was at the movies alone, a movie which he could not recall anything from. Maybe he would keep the switchblade, maybe he wouldn’t. I don’t think either is much more likely in such a situation, definitely not compared to the unlikeliness we are dealing with on the other side of the argument.

15

And that’s easy to tamper with a jury if you have an honest, Henry Fonda-like face. Seriously, a juror going out and doing his own research, much less bringing evidence not presented in the courtroom into the jury deliberations, should have been immediate cause for a mistrial. By any objective standard is a worse legal movie than Runaway Jury. But the cast is phenomenal.

Stranger

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"Gentleman of the Jury, consider: how much do you remember of the last mediocre movie you saw? Certainly there are many that blend together. Not to mention that it was late at night when most of us do not remember clearly. Then come home to find that your father, your very lifeblood, the rock of your family, has been brutally murdered, and tell me, would you remember the details of some pointless film when your life has just been shattered?

As for losing the switchblade, I think any of us with young boys will know they are predisposed to losing things, however much they might value them. Find me a boy that’s never lost things, or even doesn’t lose things on a monthly basis, and you’ve found the second coming!

My fellow citizens, lay out the facts. The father is dead by a knifeblade. The prosecution has not proven that it was the boy’s knife, they have not deflated the boy’s alibi, they cannot place the boy in the father’s room except by a silhouette that could be anybody. I can’t tell you who the murderer is, but I can tell you that I have serious doubts that this young man could have done it. And that’s what we’re looking for here - reasonable doubt"

The biggest problem for the kid was that he had a lousy lawyer.

17

It’s not impossible to forget stuff about movies, but it isn’t much of an alibi either to just say you were at the movies and forgot which one. Anyway, enough of this discussion, we’re up to 13 angry men soon.

18

Can we get absolute word on this? Did he do research? He went for a walk and bought a knife at a store along the way. He did not visit the crime scene, speak with anyone about the case, look up any data on anyone involved.

He only brought out the knife when Lee J Cobb said that the one introduced as evidence was unique. Note that a juror said it was unique, the prosecution did not.
ETA
I should probably read the other threads before asking dumb questions.

19

The switchblade design, while not unique was rare enough that the shop owner declared at the trial that he had never seen one before. In the movie, on close up scenes of the knife, you could see that it was highly decorative with dragon running up the handle.

Like I said in the OP and mr jp said in previous threads, the standard for “reasonable doubt” cannot be one that would allow all defendants to go free in all trials ever. All trials have problems with eyewitness testimony, all trials have evidence that is slightly inconsistent. But the plain fact of the matter is that nobody else could have reasonably done it.

If you actually sit down and listen to what the kid is asserting as the version of the events that took place, it’s the exact same kind of lazy bullshit excuse that people spin when they want to get out of a lie.

If the kid had not “lost” his switchblade on the exact wrong night and was able to provide a duplicate, then there’s room to get the kid off. If the murderer had used any other kind of weapon, even a similar model switchblade, then there’s room to get the kid off. If the kid had decided to stay home that night, then there’s room to get the kid off. If the father had gotten murdered the night before or the night after, there’s room to get the kid off. But to believe such a fantastical sequence of events happened all in a row is beyond reasonable.

You know what it’s like actually? It’s like when people show up at ER with ketchup bottles stuck up their asses and they talk about how they were getting groceries out of their car and their dog was tugging at their pants and they tripped slightly and the belt came undone at just the wrong moment and they fell on the ketchup bottle and got lodged. Is it conceivable? Yeah, sure. Is it plausible enough to cast reasonable doubt? Hell no! That dude was engaging in ass play!

I find it ironic that, despite the overt message of the movie of “when people bring their personal prejudices into a courtroom, justice can be subverted”, the entire movie is so seductive that you leave it wanting the kid not to have done it and end up trying to support that however possible instead of just looking at the plain facts of the case.

20

If the kid didn’t dispute any of the three, we can assume that they must stand.

  • The knife store owner testified that he remembered the kid coming in to buy the blade. If the kid didn’t then it was the job of the defence to bring that up and I can’t believe even the shittiest public defender in the world could have failed to challenge it if the knife store owner was flat out lying.
  • We saw the murder weapon in the movie as evidence.
  • If the kid still had his switchblade, then presenting it any time before trial would have been a great idea.

It’s not that he’s just the most likely candidate, it’s that there is no other reasonable candidate because the story the kid proposes is absurd. There’s no reasonable other person who could have possibly done it.