The movie opens into a courtroom with a judge, a jury of 12 men and the accused sitting there. The judge ‘Rudy Bond’ asks the jury to come up with a unanimous opinion on the fact whether the accused (18 year old boy from a slum) is guilty of allegedly stabbing his father to death or not and if he is found guilty then a death sentence will be given to him. The 12 men jury proceeds to a private room for the deliberations. Except Henry Fonda (8th juror), every juror was of the view that the accused is guilty of murdering his father. Henry said that he cannot in good conscience vote ‘guilty’ when he feels that there is reasonable doubt of the boy's guilt. He points out that the two main witnesses presented cannot be considered accurate and reliable …show more content…
Henry said that the fact that the elderly man listened the boy yelling “I am going to kill you” is a mere assumption of him since at the same time a train was passing which created disturbance and in fact many a times people don’t mean the same while saying it. He even mentioned that it is not possible for the man to see the accused running within 15 seconds since he had a limited ability to walk. Juror 11 (George Voskovec) even questioned whether the defendant would have reasonably fled the scene before cleaning the knife of fingerprints, then come back three hours later to retrieve the knife. This made him think that the boy was not guilty and so he changed his …show more content…
To this, juror 8 said that it might be because of the emotional stress the accused was going through which made him forget certain events. Juror 3 calls into the question whether it was possible for a shorter person to stab a taller person. For this, juror 3, juror 5 and 8 conducted an experiment which proved that someone that much shorter than his opponent would stab underhanded at an upwards angle which made many of the jurors believe that the defendant was not guilty. After considering these arguments, juror 12, juror 1 and juror 7 changed their votes to ‘not guilty’ thus making the vote 9–3 and leaving only three dissenters: Jurors 3, 4 and 10. Juror 4 then mentions that the woman had seen the murder from her bedroom window still serves as solid evidence. This made juror 12 to again change his vote to guilty. But then juror 8 explains that since the woman was not wearing her spectacles so the image she saw must be blurry and thus could not make out who was the murderer. This made juror 10, juror 12 and juror 4 to change their vote to ‘not guilty’ thus making the vote