12 Angry Men (1957)

Sidney Lumet’s film is relevant in many ways to our course. The film shows us how bias, esp. racial bias, threatens to cloud our judgment and thus to force us to ignore alternative explanations, which is to say that prejudice bids us to make the easiest inference available and to make unqualified statements. This film is also important because it points out how even seemingly-certain evidence can be erroneous in that testimony is not always reliable: one, because a person may have an undisclosed motive for testifying; two, because certain testimonies may be given under adverse pressure (the boy who can’t explain where he’s been because he is emotionally overwhelmed by his father’s death); three, because a witness’s perception of an event may not be as accurate as he or she’d like to believe. Thus, film is especially relevant to argument because it demonstrates that any claim (in the film’s case, a guilty verdict) must be supported by reliable evidence. Much of what the juror’s argue over is whether certain evidence really demonstrates the boy was at fault (testimony and circumstantial evidence). What makes movie especially engrossing is that many jurors offer compelling counter inferences about the evidence, which, taken together, establish enough “reasonable doubt” for jury to presume the boy innocent. Overall, 12 Angry Men demonstrates the importance of having an open mind, of carefully interpreting and evaluating evidence, and of having a respectful tolerance for opinions contrary to one’s own.