Guilty Of The Boy From 'Twelve Angry Men'

Guilty or innocent? This question dangles between life and death. Should the boy from Twelve Angry Men be put to death or released? Twelve jurors are deemed responsible for determining whether or not a boy is guilty of murdering his father. The defense has rested, and the jurors must debate the evidence and come to a unanimous consensus. The boy is innocent because the witnesses were proven to lie/make incorrect statements on the stand. The knife, said to be “unique” was proven not to be. The boy was a skilled knife fighter, making the murder wound unlikely to be from him, as it was how an inexperienced person would stab. One of the reasons the boy should be acquitted is the reasonable doubt that arises when the witnesses are proven to have

One example of an eyewitness giving a statement that can be disproved is when the downstairs neighbor of the boy and his father claimed to have “heard a body falling, and he ran to the door.” This was later disproved when the jurymen reenacted the scene (as the old man had suffered two strokes, his walking ability was impaired, let alone running). With this, how could a reasonable person still say the boy is guilty when the witness lied? Another reason the boy is innocent is that the knife that the boy had bought just hours before the murder was very similar to the murder weapon. The storekeeper who sold the knife said it was “the only one of its kind”, but the knife was proven more common than he said. This was shown when Juror Eight found and bought an exact version of the knife in a pawn shop in the boy's neighborhood. This shows that the boy doesn't technically have a direct link to the murder, as the weapon could have been used by another person