Conscience In 12 Angry Men

For more than half a century, “12 Angry Men” has served as America’s foremost cinematic self-image. It’s a terrific entertainment, but that alone doesn’t explain its status as one of IMDB’s perpetual top-10 films of all time (No. 6 as I write this)—an old-school, single-set talkathon perched incongruously among adolescent fantasies. Like Schindler’s List (No. 7), it speaks powerfully to our belief that one individual with a conscience can make a real difference in the world, and that’s a genuinely uplifting message that people do right to embrace. Only a stone-hearted soul could fail to be moved watching Henry Fonda slowly, methodically sway 11 other jurors, one by one, employing only reason, compassion, and common sense as weapons. Should
There isn’t some hidden twist that nobody’s ever noticed until now. But in attempting to make the scenario as dramatic as possible, Rose inadvertently and unwittingly made it almost impossible for The Kid not to have killed his old man. Is he guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt? No. If he’s innocent, however, then so was O.J. Simpson, using pretty much the exact same arguments. (I’m indebted to Vincent Bugliosi’s Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away With Murder for much of the following analysis. For anyone harboring any doubt about Simpson’s guilt—or about whether Oswald acted alone in killing JFK, for that matter—Bugliosi’s books, though abominably written, are
That’s a million-to-one shot, conservatively. In the movie, Fonda dramatically produces a duplicate switchblade that he’d bought in The Kid’s neighborhood (which, by the way, would get him disqualified if the judge learned about it, as jurors aren’t allowed to conduct their own private investigations during a trial), by way of demonstrating that it’s hardly unique. But come on. I don’t own a switchblade, but I do own a wallet, which I think I bought at Target or Ross or some similar chain—I’m sure there are thousands of other guys walking around with the same wallet. But the odds that one of those people will happen to kill my father are minute, to put it mildly. And the odds that I’ll also happen to lose my wallet the same day that a stranger leaves his own, identical wallet behind at the scene of my father’s murder (emptied of all identification, I guess, for this analogy to work; cut me some slack, you get the idea) are essentially zero. Coincidences that wild do happen—there’s a recorded case of two brothers who were killed a year apart on the same street, each at age 17, each while riding the same bike, each run over by the same cab driver, carrying the same passenger—but they don’t happen frequently enough for us to seriously consider them as exculpatory evidence. If something that insanely freakish implicates you, you’re just screwed,