Prejudice In Reginald Rose's 12 Angry Men

815 Words4 Pages

In the book 12 Angry Men by Reginald Rose’s the author tells a story of 12 men who have to determine the verdict of a young man who is on trial for 1st degree murder. The 12 men discuss the case to find out that many of them are convicting this kid from emotion and prejudice against the boy who is on trial. Analyzing prejudice on a larger scale we can understand that it is not always about race, Juror number three is prejudice against the defendant because of his age. Twelve angry men has multiple ways of showing us how prejudice can affect our judgment and how it is hard to change someone's mind who is only open to their own opinions, the jury is able to get passed their prejudice only by being confronted by the facts . And by making the Jurors who vote …show more content…

Things get heated between the men discussing the case which leads to juror number 3 saying “ Shut up, you son of a bitch! Let me go, God dammit ! I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!” This makes it seem that juror three is driven by emotion and not by evidence which makes even more jurors question the verdict of guilty and find reasonable doubt. The next juror who is driven by prejudice and show much bigotry is juror number ten “ I’ll tell you something. The crime is being committed right in this room… I Don't understand...Look you know THOSE PEOPLE lie...they don't know what the truth is...human life doesn't mean as much to them as it does to us… Look these people are drinking and fighting all the time and if somebody gets killed...they don't care…” .Juror number ten by the author is labeled as the bigot and for obvious reasons. He only cares about his own opinion and thinks of himself as better than everyone else. He sees this kid as a piece of trash which the world would be better off without. Only convicting this boy by his racial background and terrible