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Prejudice In Twelve Angry Men, By Reginald Rose

690 Words3 Pages

In the play Twelve Angry Men, author Reginald Rose makes a comment on how a person’s prejudices dictate how they make decisions. In the play, twelve unnamed jurors, who only refer to each other as their numbers, are assigned to set an unseen defendants verdict in a murder trial. The only description of the accused given is stated by the jurors as they discuss the case and voice their opinions. The jurors’ own prejudices against “those/them” people, people from slums, and personal experience, influenced their decisions as they dictated a verdict. Throughout the play, multiple jurors are seen referencing that the defendant is one of “those” people or one of “them.” Early in the play, juror ten makes a comment while speaking on how a boy could kill his father just like that, “It’s those people! I’m tellin’ you they let the kids run wild up there. Well, maybe it serves ’em right” (Rose 10). Juror ten continues to state his dismay with “those” people and default to this stance …show more content…

The third juror continually mentions how kids are not respectful and how some are just “rotten,” he also is immediate in his “guilty” verdict from the beginning. His disposition towards “bad kids” appears to leak into his decision making, as he attempts to state and agree with every point that can be used to treat the defendant as guilty. The juror is one of the few that are determined on a guilty verdict for the accused and is the last juror to hold this stance until the end of the story. His prejudice against the defendant from his own experiences with his kid is called out in the final scene of the play. Juror three goes on a rant about how he is the “only one who sees” that the kid and all other kids are the same and rotten; where he is only stopped when juror eight says, “It’s not your boy. He’s somebody else” (Rose

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