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12 Angry Men Rhetorical Analysis

681 Words3 Pages

Sydney Price
Ms. Teeling
English I
20 January 2023
The Danger of Detachment in Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men
What would you do if you sat in a cramped, sweaty room for hours with all the pressure on you and your fellow jurors to make one decision: the life or death of a young boy? The jurors of Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men face this very predicament, forced to decide on the innocence of a boy on trial for murder. Faced with a question of this magnitude, the jurors fight to bring their opinion to light, while also attempting to keep themselves from attaching to the case and to the boy, citing that there's always something else to do, something else to care about. Through the use of pathos in 12 Angry Men by Reginald Rose, he illustrates the detachment of jurors within a court case is dangerous.
Juries, by …show more content…

The jurors continually exhibit the opposite of the aforementioned emotions and beliefs. After the protest by the 8th Juror about the oddly quick guilty verdict voted on by the jurors, the 7th Juror dismissed him continually, “It’s just that we’re talking about somebody’s life here. I mean, we can’t decide in five minutes. Suppose we’re wrong? 7TH JUROR: Suppose we’re wrong! [...] You can suppose anything,” (Rose 12). Juror 8 presents pathos through reminding them about the life of the boy once again. This yet again does not work in the face of the other jurors, with one of the jurors completely ridiculing the ideas of Juror 8. This detachment within the Juror, ignoring the life of another person, and choosing not to vote without spending the time to discuss the situation, which may have ended up with the unjust death of an innocent boy. Juror 7 immediately brushes off the severity of the situation, relating to a matter of “anything” when it is in fact anything

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