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Examples Of Prejudice In 12 Angry Men

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Prejudice is an opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience and can influence people to act in certain ways. In the book 12 Angry Men the jurors based their decisions not entirely on the evidence they were presented with in court, but rather, because of their own prejudices. In every scene of the play the jurors have these prejudices and are trying to overcome them by using logic and reasoning. One of the first examples of prejudice in the book is when Juror 2 states “Well, it’s hard to put into words. I just think he’s guilty. I thought it was an obvious one from the word go. I mean nobody proved otherwise”. When juror 2 states this he is not basing this off any sort of reasoning or fact, instead this is a biased …show more content…

When he says “ I mean nobody proved otherwise” it shows he thinks the defendant is guilty because the attorney hasn’t proved that he is innocent but in fact it’s supposed to be that the defendant is innocent until proven guilty. The person being accused isn’t trying to prove his innocence as much as the prosecutor is trying to prove he’s guilty so Juror 2 clearly doesn’t understand how this works and just saying he’s guilty because he hasn't been proven innocent which is a prejudice against the defendant. Although Juror 2 had a lot of prejudice against the defendant juror 3 has more.
“It’s the kids. That's the way they are, you know, they don’t listen.” When Juror 3 makes this statement he is showing a biased opinion on children raised in poor environments saying that the defendant is guilty because he’s in the group of children in poor environments. He also has a prejudice against the defendant because of what he wears and his color. “That man’s a dangerous killer. You could see it.” You could just see it? Juror 3 is making a prejudice based with no evidence or facts sheerly on what the defendant looks like which is extremely wrong and

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