Twelve Angry Men: The Jury System

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We often pride our society for becoming more advanced and better. True, we now live in a place where medicine and technology is more advanced than that of what it used to be in the past. However, criminals still litter the world, possibly even more than it had previously. To cope, we have invented, a jury system, to help us separate the guilty from the not guilty. Twelve Angry Men provides such a story about the using of the jury. The twelve jurors each has a different personality, which contributes to the complication of reaching a verdict. The jury raises a crucial question: what makes a person qualified to be a juror for a criminal trial? A qualified person should have an appropriate personality and correct beliefs. More specifically, they should wish to seek the truth so that justice can be achieved, be …show more content…

According to “Juror Q & A,” it states, “As a juror, you must be fair and impartial. Your actions and decisions must be free of any bias or prejudice.” This is opposite to Juror Number Three’s personality as “… extremely opiniated man within whom can be detected a streak of sadism… is intolerant of opinions other than his own” (pg. 86). There is no reason to hire someone like this since the whole purpose of the jury is to find if the person is or not based on the presented evidence not one’s own belief. Furthermore, the judge said that, “I urge you to deliberately honestly and thoughtfully” (pg. 87). From all of this, it can be seen that it is preferred for a juror to be open-minded.
Summing up, Twelve Angry Men is a story about jurors with different personalities. From these personalities, we can see that the qualifying traits of a good juror is the willingness to uncover the truth, so that a valid and accurate conclusion is made, a compassionate heart, so that there is an indifferent view on the victims, leading to an unbiased opinion, and an open mind, so that one will be