Group members: Claire, Kayla, Jaclyn, Chiara Mrs.

Pearlman 12 Angry men April 14, 2014 12 Angry Jurors Decide Not Guilty It was a hot day in New York City for 12 men who were serving on the jury when a 18 year old boy, Juan Rodriguez Garcia Pablo Sanchez was on trial for stabbing his father. After a tiring day of discussing the case, the judge instructed the jury to decide whether the boy was guilty or not. The jury went back to a quiet, separate room where they talked about the case even though at first the majority agreed that the boy was guilty and knew that their final vote had to be unanimous. One man stood alone against all of the others and fought against the evidence presented in court. Slowly a discussion that was supposed to last an hour lasted all day and one by one the jurors in the room began to side with the one man who had stood alone. To represent how the group of jurors felt initially about the case, a vote was held before discussion to see where everyone stood. Everyone voted the defendant guilty, except for one. Juror 8, Davis, knew that a unanimous vote for guilty would condemn the defendant to death and wanted to spend more time on the case. He was not yet convinced that the boy was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It is an understatement to say that his fellow jurors did not understand his objection. Many were adamant about how the defendant was obviously guilty and insulted Juror 8 for wasting their time. They agreed to talk only for a few hours, until the skeptical juror could be convinced to send the boy to his death. The only man who thought the boy wasnt guilty stayed strong, trying to draw every other man to his side. As they listened to multiple theories of why the defendant was not guilty, the jurors started to think deeper into the background of the boy and the evidence presented in the courtroom. Every time someone would rethink the case and go over the evidence again, some of the men would change their vote because holes in the stories caused them to have a reasonable doubt. This made one juror very angry, because for him there was no possible reason that the boy was innocent. Although the facts from the case seemed to all point in one direction, it was Juror 8, Davis, who had some doubt that caused him to re-analyze all the evidence that was given. The only real piece of evidence that was presented in the courtroom was a knife. A shopkeeper told the court that the knife was the only one of its kind and was unmistakably the murderers. Juror 8 made this point to the other jurors sitting around the table, and then presented a knife that was exactly like the murder weapon. The witnesses and their statements about the night of the murder were also taken into consideration. The woman who lived across the street claimed to have seen the whole murder from her bedroom window, but Davis soon concluded to the group that the passing El-Train could not have allowed to woman to identify the boy from sixty feet away without her glasses. The old man downstairs was also considered here as well. He claimed to have seen the boy running down the steps after the murder, and that it took him fifteen seconds to get there. After running through a situation where the jurors did the exact same thing the old man would

have done they concluded that there was no way the man got to the door in fifteen seconds to see the boy running down the stairs. He most likely assumed that it was the resident boy upstairs who was the murderer. After a long debate and discussion the final decision was to pronounce the boy not guilty due to reasonable doubt within the presented facts and evidence.