Jurors Are Not Guilty In Twelve Angry Men

Guilty or not guilty, all citizens deserve a thorough trial to defend their rights. Formulating coherent stories from events and circumstances almost cost a young boy his life. In Twelve Angry Men, 1957, a single juror did his duty to save the life of an 18 year old boy by allowing his mind to rationalize the cohesive information presented by the court and its witnesses. The juror’s name was Mr. Davis, he was initially the only one of 12 jurors to vote not guilty in reason that the young boy, sentenced with first degree murder, may be innocent. I am arguing that system 1 negatively affects the jurors opinion on the case and makes it difficult for Mr. Davis to convince the other jurors of reasonable doubt.

In regards to Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, several processes and ideas were used during the vote that

Davis, the first juror to vote not guilty, ignored his emotional attachment to the first-degree murder case and thought purely around the evidence the boy and the witnesses provided to the court. The other jurors said, “eleven men and you think he’s guilty, nobody has to think about it twice except you.” They said this in accordance to system 1 and original response to the stories told in the court. Otherwise, not once did Mr. Davis refer to system 1 through laziness. Mr. Davis spent the entirety of that hot day in a room with eleven other men, spending every second he had on convincing them of the potential error that could have been made in convicting the young boy. He was able to retain confidence and doubt uniformly, because through his analytical thought processing, he was able to pull unreliable facts from the witnesses stories that prove the witnesses may not have even seen the boy commit the murder. Mr. Davis was meticulous while analyzing the entirety of the case, ranging from the eyesight of the witness to the angle of the knife. He used precision and facts in order to persuade the rest of the jurors that not all evidence is