Also, it was hard for me to get over how the last juror to switch looked exactly like an older Jason Segel.
I tend to agree, but part of a reasonable doubt analysis is constructing an alternative scenario and seeing if it passes the laugh test to determine if it is reasonable.
So asking the question “in what other way and by what other person would this man have been murdered” is a good question. If you can’t come up with an explanation that doesn’t seem absurd, then it seems that there is no reasonable doubt that it was the kid that did it. Many things are proven through negative inference.
Can we settle this soon? I’ve got a baseball game to go to.
What kind of Doper are you?! You’re sitting there with some baseball tickets burning a hole in your pocket…
In the 1950s, people went to movies the way we watch television or surf the web today. Several times a week wasn’t unusual, doing it just to kill time or sit in the air conditioning wasn’t unusual, totally forgettable B movies weren’t unusual.
What I’m arguing is that it was not a good alibi. I don’t think this should be controversial at all. It’s somewhat hard to even think of a worse alibi. It does not rest on the prosecutor to disprove an alibi where there is nothing that indicates that it is true other than the words of the accused.
As blatantly pointed out several times in the script and as a theme that is arguably the cornerstone of the entire story, this is not within the scope of the jury’s duty. If you missed this salient point, I don’t know what to tell you.
It’s not the obligation of the defense to propose an alternate theory to deflect accusations against them. The alibi and story of the lost knife are intentionally not credible. This is crucial to the story. The crux of the story is that despite those facts that would normally make it an open and shut case, there are glaring weaknesses in the prosecution’s case. I mean, that’s it. Our intrepid critical-thinking architect looks past the veneer of a typical open and shut case. That’s the goddamned story!
We don’t get to see the trial, which by all accounts had the defendant represented by a less than enthusiastic attorney. The jury deliberations certainly cast more than reasonable doubt on witness testimony.
The downstairs neighbor’s testimony of what he heard was at odds with the across the tracks neighbor who claimed that an el train was rumbling past at the exact time of the murder. Furthermore, this 75 year old stoke victim who walks with a limp and needed assistance getting onto the the witness stand claimed to have made it 50+ feet across his entire apartment, (while the 17-18 year old kid ran the same distance) unbolted and opened his door in time to identify the kid as he ran down the stairs, exiting the building.
The woman across the tracks isn’t credible either, at least not as far as a positive ID is concerned. Never mind the eyeglass nose-mark theatrics, let’s give her 20/20 vision. She’s been lying in a dark room with her eyes closed for over an hour, trying to fall asleep. Her pupils are about as big as saucers now, but she looks up and out her window, through the windows of a passing el train into her neighbors lighted apartment and is able to make a positive identification of the kid stabbing his father from 60’ away. Through the moving train. In about two seconds. Okay, sure.
Also compelling was the immigrant juror’s question: Why did the kid go back home three hours later to the apartment he just stabbed his father to death in? And if it was to recover the knife, why did he wipe prints from the knife and then leave it stuck in his father’s chest? And why would he go out and buy a murder weapon and then show it off to his friends before using it to murder his father hours later?
The author makes concessions throughout the story that the kid might not be innocent, but everything in the script points to the fact that it’s rightful and just under the law that he be found not guilty. Innocent and not guilty are not necessarily mutually inclusive in a court of law.
Are you serious? Aren’t you a recently barred attorney?
Even if I accepted your premise, (which I don’t) would it seem absurd to you that a convicted felon with a history of forgery and abusing his own child might have a few enemies in the world?
To you people who think that he should’ve been let go, for whatever reason. How certain do you think we should be before putting someone in jail? Should it be more certain than 1-10,000?
Have you ever seen a criminal trial where it is that certain that the accused did it? Eye witnesses are always unreliable. Most of the time it’s theoretically possible that someone else came around the same time and committed the crime using the same tools. Even confessions are often fake, far more often than those odds.
Or maybe it’s because you don’t think that several independent lines of inconclusive evidence can be combined and amount to a burden of evidence that is larger than each of them by themselves.
The way this movie is viewed makes me highly worried about the institution of jury trials.
In this script the witness testimonies are not credible. The defendant has no credible alibi. That leaves the knife. The “lost” knife is highly suspect and as I already mentioned, intentionally so. The prosecution argued that the knife in question was extremely rare, which was evidently, but not definitively, proven false.
No, 10,000 to 1 is way beyond reasonable doubt. The facts as presented in the script of 12 Angry Men were well within the realm of reasonable doubt to me. You say “explain why the same knife was used” and I say “why the fuck would this kid go home to the apartment he just murdered his father in?” If you care to put forth a theory to explain that, I’ll be happy to listen.
Modern forensics make the story archaic anyway. With the (lack of) evidence presented in the script, Saul Goodman could have had the case dismissed before it ever went to trial in today’s legal system.
And as much as you’re worried about me being a juror, I’m worried about you being one. A plausible story is not the same thing as guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
If he lost the knife when he was at his father’s earlier in the day, anyone else could have picked it up there and killed the dad. No need to run off with the knife in that case. Just wipe away the prints. Also, didn’t the evidence indicate the stabbing was done by someone who didn’t know how to properly use the knife?
The juror makes that point in the revised playscript (which is also the basis for the 1997 Showtime adaptation). He points out that this guy, who had a history of violence, jail time, gambling, bar fights, etc. could very well have enemies…a bookie, a guy he’d beaten up, a woman he’d picked up.
Exactly. All the eyewitness evidence is crap. All there is is the circumstantial evidence that the father was stabbed with a knife that resembled a knife the son had bought earlier.
But the angle at which the father was stabbed isn’t consistent with the kid having done it. And why weren’t there any fingerprints on the knife? If the kid ran out in a panic, there would have been. But if he took the time to wipe his fingerprints off the knife, why not just TAKE THE KNIFE? The circumstantial evidence points toward guilt, but the forensic evidence points more strongly toward the killer being someone else.
The knife falls out of the kids pocket in the apartment. Later that night one of the father’s shady friends shows up. They have an argument and he picks up the switchblade and stabs the father with it. He’s older than the kid and taller, explaining the entry angle of the wound. He doesn’t take the murder weapon with him – after all, he found the knife in the seat cushions of the couch so there’s nothing to tie it to him. But he does take time to wipe the handle with his handkerchief before fleeing.
At best, the defendant is saying no more than, “I wasn’t there,” and I think you’re correct that it doesn’t really add anything to his defense. He’s essentially saying “believe me,” but the alibi doesn’t give any additional basis for believing him beyond whatever the other evidence leads the jury to conclude anyway. At worst, it can detract from his credibility.
As I recall, the only evidence introduced about the use of the knife was that the wound was consistent with a downward stabbing. One of the jurors (Klugman?) argued that an experienced knife fighter would have stabbed underhand rather than overhand. I don’t recall there being any evidence that the defendant was an experienced knife fighter, however, or that there was any actual fight, as opposed to just a stabbing.
Not necessarily. The jurors arguing against the downstairs neighbor’s account are not saying that he was mistaken but rather that he was straight-up lying. If he was too slow to get across the room in time to see the defendant, then it’s not that he would have seen something ambiguous that he decided was the defendant. He would have seen nothing, and his story that he did see something would be made up. Another juror could conclude that this account is not reasonable – what is the neighbor’s motive to lie?
The scene with the knife angles never made any sense to me.
Firstly, the jurors convincingly prove that the kid’s height differential is perfectly consistent with the angle of entry if he used an overhand grip (not disprove it as many people remember). Then, the juror who grew up in the slums comes in and talks about how an overhand grip is not the best way to use a switch blade because you would have to change grips and that it’s much easier to kill a man with an underhand grip. Somehow, this is convincing to the jurors because they’ve forgotten that we already know the father was killed via a stab with an overhand grip. Whether the underhand grip is easier or not is completely irrelevant.
Plus, the underhand grip is only easier if you immediately open the switchblade before stabbing someone. It’s perfectly possible that switchblade was already open well before the murder, perfectly explaining away the overhand grip.
In short, that entire tangent had no relevance to the case at all and shouldn’t have convinced anyone.
No, not lying. He’s a mixed-up old man. We KNOW he couldn’t have heard the son say he was going to kill his father at the time of the murder, because the passing elevated train would make such hearing impossible. We KNOW the limping senior citizen could not have gotten to the door as fast as he claimed. The man’s statements are proven false. Juror 8 gives the old guy the benefit of the doubt regarding his intentions. The story itself doesn’t seem to indicate the old man has malice, just confusion not uncommon among some elderly people.
I believe I suggested a very similar explanation of the crime in a previous thread. It’s certainly possible the kid is guilty, but this series of events always seemed at least as plausible of the prosecution’s version. Kid drops his knife at home, father’s bookie/loan shark/secret lover comes by, things get heated, he sees the switchblade, kills the father in a crime of passion, runs away, kid happens on to the scene after the fact. None of the prosecution’s evidence refutes this version of events.
What’s shocking to me is how people accept the prosecution’s evidence at face value. All the stuff about the knife being unique strike me as the kind of testimony a decent defense attorney would have shot down.
I think you’re trying too hard to make the alternate story plausible. If he could not have gotten to the door in time to see anything, but he says he saw something, then he’s lying. It’s possible that he was hallucinating, but that’s not common at all, and a reasonable jury ought not consider that possibly to be a source of reasonable doubt. So either he’s right or he’s lying; there’s no scenario in which he’s simply confused or mistaken about what he saw.
Note too that the passing of the train making it too loud to hear is only possible if one accepts the other witness’s account as true. – another reason one cannot disregard the eyewitness testimony completely. (One also has to accept the other juror’s supposition about how loud the passing train would be, too, of course).
There was an argument earlier between father and son heard by the old man. It is suggested that this is the time the old man saw the boy leave. The old man is just confused about the time and simply bears witness to an arguement and exit both the defense and prosecution acknowledge.
Yes, and part of my work is criminal defense. And this is absolutely how juries look at things. And I try to get them to look at it from your viewpoint (that reasonable doubt means this impossibly high standard). As others have said, nobody could ever be convicted under your view without video evidence of the Defendant pulling the trigger.
If, in a juror’s mind, if anything but “the Defendant did it” cannot be at least hypothesized, then that is very strong evidence of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The OJ case is a perfect example of nitpicking over minor discrepancies.
In this movie, sure the kid may have lost the same model knife, he may have been unlucky to be at the movies with no alibi at the time his father was murdered shortly after he had threatened to kill him. Maybe he didn’t remember the name of the movie. Maybe the witness wasn’t wearing her glasses. Maybe it did take the old man too short of a time to get to the window to see it happen. Maybe one of his dad’s felon associates murdered him on the same night that all of this happened.
Maybe, sure. But look at the totality of the evidence. It’s a slam dunk, and IMHO not reasonable to suggest otherwise lest “reasonable doubt” be found in every case.
You may be misremembering; Juror #5 (the one from a slum)'s point wasn’t that using the switchblade underhanded was better, but rather that it was the method used by experienced knife fighters in the slums. The accused was an experienced knife fighter from the slums (he’d been “picked up”, that is, either arrested or convicted, for knife fighting), hence Juror #5’s opinion that, had the killer been the accused, “he’d have gone for him underhanded”, as a result of “the experience he’d had all his life handling [switchblade knives]”.
The idea is that the overhand attack suggests that someone other than an experienced knife fighter, ie someone other than the accused, committed the murder. How convincing it was is up for debate, but it was relevant to the case.