Act 1 Twelve Angry Men takes place in a jury room in the late afternoon on a hot summer's day in New

York City. After the curtain rises, the judge's voice is heard offstage, giving instructions to the jury. He says that the defendant is being tried for first-degree murder, which carries a mandatory death penalty. The judge adds that if the jury has reasonable doubt about the guilt of the accused, they must acquit him. The verdict must be unanimous.
Juror # 8 admits that he doesn't necessarily believe the boy's story, but he feels that the accused is entitled to a thoughtful weighing of the facts - the legal standard that they were given by the judge: It's not easy to raise my hand and send a boy off to die without talking about it first...We're talking about somebody's life here. We can't decide in five minutes. Supposin' we're wrong. Juror # 8 - After many days of listening to evidence in the case, Juror # 8 evaluates the poorly-argued cross-examination by the "just plain stupid" defense lawyer: "Everybody sounded so positive. I began to get a pecular feeling about this trial. I mean, nothing is that positive...I began to get the feeling that the defense counsel wasn't conducting a thorough enough cross-examination." He also reminds everyone that there was only one "alleged eye-witness" to the killing, although there were others who heard the killing and the flight of the boy, and there was also a lot of "circumstantial evidence." He tries to instill doubt in the others regarding the witnesses who testified under oath. Through a clever thought process, he causes Juror # 12 to contradict himself and admit that the whole case "isn't an exact science": # 8: Supposing they're wrong...Could they be wrong?...They're only people. People make mistakes. Could they be wrong? Discussion of the Knife, the Murder Weapon: The rotational order is broken when a discussion of the knife that the defendant recently purchased interferes. Juror # 8 requests that the very-unusual knife "in evidence" be brought in for another look. The sequence of events related to the knife are reviewed again: The boy went out of the house at 8 o'clock after being 'punched' several times by his father He went to a neighborhood "junk shop" and bought a switch-blade knife with a "very unusual carved handle and blade" He met some friends in front of a tavern about 8:45 pm, and talked with them for about an hour The boy's friends identified the "death weapon" in court as the "very same knife" that the boy had with him The boy arrived home at around 10 o'clock, and claimed he went to a movie about 11:30 pm, returning home at 3:10 am "to find his father dead and himself arrested." The boy claimed that the knife fell through a hole in his pocket on the way to the movies and that he never saw it again

However, no witnesses saw the boy go out of the house, or at the theatre, and the boy couldn't recall the names of the films he saw. Juror # 4 doubts the boy's claims, believing that the boy stayed home instead of going to the movies, had another fight with his father and stabbed him to death with the "very unusual knife," and then left the house at 12:10 pm. Counter-argument: One of the film's most dramatic moments is when Juror # 8 argues: "...It's possible the boy lost his knife and somebody else stabbed his father with a similar knife. It's just possible...I'm just

saying a coincidence is possible." He confounds the other jurors by introducing a new piece of evidence that he has acquired. From his pocket, he produces a knife identical to the one with which the boy allegedly stabbed his father, and sticks it in the wooden table next to the other switchblade. He tells the incredulous jurors that someone else could have bought an identical $6 knife, like he did the night before, at a little pawn shop in the boy's neighborhood just two blocks from the boy's house, and used it to kill the boy's father. He exclaims: "IT'S POSSIBLE," as the perfunctory Juror # 4 responds: "BUT NOT VERY PROBABLE." After a short break, the discussion continues with a reexamination of the case. Juror # 3 asks about the testimony of the old man who heard the threat and the body hit the floor, and saw the kid running down the stairs and out of the house. And Juror # 12 and # 4 repeat the testimony of the old lady who "looked right in the open window and saw the boy stab his father" - and "saw the killing through the windows of a moving elevated train." There were six cars on the train and she saw the killing through the last two cars. Counter-argument: Juror # 8 questions whether it would have been that easy to hear and identify the voice that issued the threat. He also speculates how long it would take a six-car el train going at medium speed to pass a given point (the open window of the room where the killing took place) - maybe ten seconds. He wonders about the contradictory timing of the testimony of the old man and woman: how could the old man in the apartment downstairs distinctly hear the threat and the body hit the floor a second later, while the woman across the street was viewing the killing through the last two cars, when an el train was making a deafening noise as it passed? We can assume that the body hit the floor just as the train went by. Therefore, the train had been roaring by the old man's window a full ten seconds before the body hit the floor. The old man according to his own testimony ("I'm gonna kill you, body hitting the floor a split second later") would have had to hear the boy make this statement with the el roaring past his nose. It's not possible he could have heard it. Vote of 9 to 3: At this point, Juror # 5 changes his vote to 'not guilty'. And Juror # 11 is definitely swayed by Juror # 8's independence of judgment and reasonable doubt. He brings up his own crucial questions: why did the boy return to the scene of the crime three hours after the stabbing murder ("Wouldn't he be afraid of being caught?")? And if the boy was returning to retrieve the knife that could be connected to him, why did he leave it there in the first place? Juror # 3 castigates # 8 for twisting the testimony around to support the boy, and rails at everyone for being convinced of the boy's innocence. His threat to kill # 8 is recognized as a false one: Juror # 8: (softly and defiantly) You don't really mean you'll kill me, do you? Discussion of the Old Woman's Eye-Witness Account and Eye-sight: There's only one major issue - the "unshakable testimony" given by the woman who lived across the street who actually saw the murder committed. According to Juror # 4, she testified that at the critical moment, she saw the boy raise his arm over his head and stab down into the father's chest. She went to bed at eleven o'clock that night, and her bed was next to an open window where she could look out while lying down and see directly into the boy's room across the street. She tossed and turned for over an hour - unable to fall asleep. Finally, she turned toward the window at about 12:10 am and as she looked out, she "got a good look" at the boy in the act of stabbing his father, through the windows of the passing el train. Vacillating back and forth "like a tennis ball" on his opinion, Juror # 12 changes his vote back to guilty. Counter-argument: Juror # 9 notices that Juror # 4 is rubbing the deep indented marks or impressions on the sides of his nose where his glasses rest. Juror # 9 remembers that the forty-five year-old woman

who testified against the boy had the same marks on the sides of her nose - and she kept rubbing them in court. She made a "tremendous effort" to look ten years younger "for her first public appearance" with "heavy makeup, dyed hair, brand new clothes" - and she wasn't wearing her glasses because she thought they would "spoil her looks." Juror # 4 deduces that it's logical to assume that "no one wears eyeglasses to bed" - and so it was highly unlikely that the woman could have had time to put on her glasses to see the murder sixty feet away, in the split second it occurred through the cars of the passing el train - and in the middle of the night. Juror # 8 concludes: "Maybe she honestly thought she saw the boy kill his father. I say she only saw a blur...Don't you think the woman might have made a mistake?"

I don't really know what the truth is. I don't suppose anybody will ever really know. Nine of us now seem to feel that the defendant is innocent, but we're just gambling on probabilities. We may be wrong. We may be trying to let a guilty man go free, I don't know. Nobody really can, but we have a reasonable doubt and that's something that's very valuable in our system. No jury can declare a man guilty unless it's sure. We nine can't understand how you three are still so sure.