Twelve Angry Men

Words: 468
Pages: 2

Imagine living in a world where no one asks any questions. Everyone takes every situation at face value, and never would anyone question the most popular narrative. What if the most popular narrative was misguided or misinformed? How would one deliver justice?
The play Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose asks those very questions. Following an exhausting week-long murder trial, a jury of men who are all very different meet in the jury room to discuss the trial and decide on a verdict. Though eleven out of the twelve men agree that the accused is guilty, one juror disagrees and asks to discuss the trial further. With a surprising amount of reluctance, the other jurors begrudgingly agree to carry on with the discussion until there is only juror
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Juror NO. 8 disagrees, and wants to discuss the details of the trial before he decides to condemn the accused. Many of the other jurors are annoyed with this man’s request to rethink a decision the rest have already decided they’re positive on. One such man is Juror NO.7. Juror NO.7 is characterized as thinking this trial is a waste of his time, and the audience’s first impressions of him is that he just wants to leave. In fact, one of his first line’s in the play is, “This better be fast. I’ve got tickets to see the Seven Year Itch tonight.” Juror NO.7 already decided the accused boy is guilty, and now he is not willing to wait even a moment to let the rest of the jurors decide. After several serious debates leading to a jury that’s split six to six on deciding whether the boy is guilty or not guilty, Juror NO.11 accuses Juror NO.7 of not taking it seriously enough after he changes his vote to not guilty, but later in the play, we see that Juror NO.7 no longer blindly follows the opinions of Juror NO.10, and truly believes there is a reasonable doubt at the end of the play, when Juror NO. 3 stands alone in his belief that the accused boy is definitively