I've always thought that. Throughout the film, the jury is actively searching for reasons NOT to find him guilty. "Beyond a shadow of a doubt" is said over and over again, to help the audience to continue to accept what is happening, but the jury has to continually come up with explanations and stories to support wild alternate theories. They should just discuss the facts of the case, as they were presented.

I still adore this movie, however, because it is so well classically acted and presented with over the top "Hollywood Sensationalism" that just grabs a viewer by the heart and never lets go.

Great article from the on-again/off-again Mike D'Angelo. I'm convinced

I've also always felt that the jury got it wrong.

To me, the part that bothered me the most was the way the eyewitness testimony was handled. Now, I'm aware that eyewitness identification in real court cases can be iffy, but that's because often the witness is called on to identify someone they had never seen before the time of the crime. But the eyewitnesses in the film, unless I badly misunderstood what the jurors were saying, were at the very least heavily implied to be identifying a young man that they already knew. It seemed to me that the jurors were essentially accepting the premise that both witnesses, especially the woman, were lying. I don't think that they should have properly done that, without some evidence from the trial itself that the witnesses weren't telling the truth.

This is an article that just highlights more how great this film was!

For me the kid is still innocent as I wouldn't convict a very young person to receive a death sentence only with circumstantial evidence.

Now the nice afterthought I had right after watching it was to take a job like juror duty very serious when the stakes are at the highest and not think to finish the earlier possible because I want to go home or watch a professional sport game that very night. The Henry Fonda character was not convinced either way at the beginning of the movie he just want to talk it over more as he could buy a similar switch-blade easily in that town , other arguments for the reasonable doubt came later and at the end they all agree for the innocent verdict. Hung jury was also a considered option.

By the way, I saw this movie for first time like two weeks ago and enjoyed more than I initially thought

Cheers

Witness evidence is not "circumstantial."

The witness evidence was the one which in the movie at the end had clear "reasonable doubt" in the view of the jurors. The circumstantial evidence I was referring to was the comment of D'Angelo

How did he calculate those odds?. I would like to see the calculation lol in any case still circumstantial evidence

Cheers
PS: This thread should be warned with Spoilers all over in the tittle HaHa (only for people who saw the movie) . Anyway, the movie is great and in my view not ultimately about finding out whether the kid is guilty or innocent but highlighting the seriousness of juror duty when the stakes are at the highest

Sorry, I didn't consider the fact that people might not have seen the movie. I have appended the title so that we can talk freely about it without going to the trouble of spoiler-tagging the hell out of everything.

Anyway, I have to agree with Unwind on this. I'm putting together my reasoning and will hopefully have it up soon.

(If anybody is too impatient for that, my default reasoning is that everybody who disagrees with me is a doodyhead and so's yer mom.)

The evidence, from the article:



I'll consider the knife and the alibi as separate pieces of evidence, but I'm going to discuss 1, 2, and 3 together under the heading of witness testimony.

Witness testimony is fairly shitty as far as evidence goes. The movie avoids stating this outright, though it does pick apart the various accounts. The reliability of each witness is found wanting. The blogger suggests that while each witness may be unreliable by him/herself, there must be some truth in their combined testimony.

The human brain is bad at intuitively understanding probability. In truth, there is no reason to expect that multiple accounts formed in similarly poor conditions wouldn't produce similarly poor results. This event occurred late at night, while people were closed away in their quarters, as an L-train was passing by. Those are not good conditions to be certain of anything you've seen or heard.

For another thing, multiple accounts may start out contradictory, but with a little hindsight, memories patch their own holes. They incorporate details that weren't in the original version and smooth over the inconsistencies. This is not deliberate; the human brain has a way of tweaking its own recall to arrive at a stable model of its environment.

Not only do we see what we "want" to see (our brains unconsciously reconfigure contradictory/incomplete details so that they gel), but we remember what we "want" to remember.

Consider the witness who “heard” the kid "loudly arguing with his father, at one point shouting words to the effect of, 'I’m gonna kill you!'" Perhaps the witness heard somebody shout something to that effect. How the witness could have known that it was the kid is another matter.

It is most likely a noisy neighborhood, in which sound is heard unidirectionally through an open window. Also, people's voices are much less distinguishable when they're shouting. It's doubtful this witness "knew" at the time that it was the kid's voice. Yet, once the kid was charged with murder, the witness retroactively “remembered” that the shouting must have been him.

If more than one person independently reported the same event the same way prior to knowing other witnesses' accounts, it would be more reliable. Independent confirmation is crucial when dealing with individual reports. As it stands, there is no proof of the kid's shouting except for a single witness who linked two different events in hindsight.

It isn't that the witness testimony is inherently dubious, but the jurors are well within their right to treat it as such based on the circumstances.

The blogger is wrong for assuming that multiple witnesses must be right, whether in whole or in part. Untrustworthy parts merely add up to an untrustworthy whole.

NOTE: One thing I want to emphasize is that nobody in the film accuses the witnesses of lying or otherwise deliberately straying from the truth.

For example, maybe the old man exaggerated his own recall of the events for attention. This doesn't mean he did it knowingly or on purpose. These things have a way of happening on their own, especially if the need is there. Furthermore, the need for attention was speculated, but the dubiousness of his claim is what's truly important.

---

This brings us to the next discrete piece of evidence: the kid's alibi. The article:



and



Something that the blogger overlooks, but would be obvious to 1950s viewers: going to the movies in the 1950s was a very different experience from going to the movies today.

Nowadays, a movie is a planned evening out. You anticipate it, check the showtime, and go in with prior knowledge of whatever it is you're going to see.

In the 1950s, not so much. You went to the movies whenever and sat down in the middle of whatever. It's like the modern television experience: you turn on the TV and start watching in the middle of a program. This doesn't mean you learn the names of the show or the people on it, and if you do, it doesn't mean you'd remember them later.

People also went to the movies a lot more in the 1950s, given the limited options of home viewing. Lots of cookie-cutter "B" movies were pumped out and piggybacked onto more prominent features. This lent further to the sameness of theatrical viewings back then.

This cannot be compared to the modern experience of going to see Magic Mike--a very distinctive movie, most likely sought out by people with an active interest in movies and/or scantily clad men. It's not something that the studios shat out on a weekend that you happened to be at the movies to see whatever.

The alibi doesn't require that he name the movies or the actors. Emotional stress is plenty explanatory for why he forgot them, and that's counting the uncertain assumption that he might have remembered them otherwise.

Human memory is not perfect. It is selective, impressionable, and ultimately unreliable as an accurate record of facts.

Maybe the lack of movie names in his alibi would make for more compelling evidence if it weren't such a weighty case, but as evidence for a murder, it's lacking.

---

And that brings us to the knife.

The article:



and



1. That a crime might occur for reasons unknown is entirely probable. A random crime is also possible, though improbable. As long as the focus is placed upon a single suspect, nobody would speculate as to the motives of other potential suspects, so of course the reasons would be unknown.

2. In terms of physical evidence, nobody--neither the kid nor anybody else--left a trace behind, save for the knife. It is established in the movie that the prosecution incorrectly claimed that the knife was unique.

While it is not far-fetched that the killer would use the same kind of knife that the kid owned (remember, it was sold in the neighborhood where the murder occurred), it is pretty far-fetched that the kid would lose his knife on the same night. That must be conceded.

However, it is common to lose small objects through a hole in your pocket. It is common for tough guys to buy switch knives in a rough neighborhood. It is common for two people in the same neighborhood to own the same thing when multiple copies of that thing are available for sale in that neighborhood. The odds are not as slim as the blogger seems to believe.

The real coincidence is that he would lose his knife and his father would get killed with a knife of the same model.

The unlikelihood increases with the kid's claim that he lost it within a short time of the murder. However, I am going to put on my Juror #8 hat and call the accuracy of that claim into question.

What can be inferred is that he noticed it missing that evening. After all, he had a very good reason to check to see if it was there.

Losing an object through a hole in your pocket is something that happens beneath your notice. If you notice it when it happens, the object wouldn't be lost, because you pick it back up.

Unless he constantly checks his pocket to see if his knife is there (maybe he's neurotic), it could have fallen out anytime since he put on those pants. This extends the timescale of the loss of the knife, thus increasing the probability.

Like I said, it is a big coincidence that the killer would use the same kind of knife that the kid lost, but that is as far as the improbability goes. This unlikely coincidence, in my view, is the only substantive evidence against the kid.

I do not think that this is enough evidence to execute a man. The kid owned a knife, not an uncommon model in his neighborhood. He claimed he lost it after an unknown person killed his father using the same kind of knife. This is obviously suspicious, but a murder conviction requires certainty.

Excellent topic. Well I really like that movie. I must have seen it dozens of times over the last three decades.
I always believed that there is a strong possibility that "the Kid" is guilty, but that is not what the movie is about. It is about how carefully any juror in a capital punishment case should consider and evaluate "reasonable doubt". The movie wouldn't work if it was obvious or "proven" that he was innocent.
However frustrating it may be: it doesn't matter at all if "the Kid" is innocent. What matters is that there is reasonable doubt based upon the fact that all jurors agree:
1) all witness accounts are unreliable
2) it might be a rather huge coincidence that "the Kid" lost the knife at the very night of ther murder and the father was killed with an identical knife, but there is a possibility (more than just faint) that the father was killed by someone alse.

I would like to add the demonstration of the Jack Klugman character who explains that the angle and height of the stab wound are pointing at the fact that it couldn't have been someone "experienced" in switch blade knife fights ("the Kid" happened to be an expert), nor someone of the same height.

I also strongly agree that the fact that there are no two witness accounts which confirm each other strongly add to the unreliablity. If more than one witness would have experienced the same event at the same time (with slight variations coming from the unreliability of human memory), there would have been strong evidence. What we have in fact are isolated events, not confirmed by anyone or anything else, from witness accounts which are highly likely very unreliable.

So, even if it doesn't really matter for the story whether "the Kid" is innocent, it does matter if we see the big picture. If there is "reasonable doubt" but still a person who killed his father walks: someone better bring the entire system of (US) court procedures in capital punishment trials back to the drawing board. In order for the movie (or the teleplay/screenplay for that matter) to work, we need to be convinced that "the Kid" is innocent, even if it is by means to strongly put all evidence into question - otherwise we would have a "We need to let him walk, because the witnesses and police investigation were lousy" - story. No way Reginald Rose didn't think about that. I am convinced that "the Kid" is innocent.

Okay, I do not think I have seen the movie, but I do remember reading the play in high-school and we *might* have been shown the movie by our teacher.

In any case, I hope you guys will forgive me if I therefore comment on this topic with only my vague memories to guide me.

The AV Club article points out micro problems (and these criticisms do bear a certain degree of validity) with the Jury's analysis of each point of evidence.

However, that is not the point, the point is that every piece of evidence while perhaps appearing to be damning in totality, is individually circumstantial. I also disagree with the articles assertion about the knife. I don't think that the knife that that was used being the same type of knife that the accused owned constitutes absolute proof by a long shot. The fact is, is that the prosecution fails to prove that the knife the kid owned was the same one that was used in the murder. Therefore, a "reasonable doubt" is introduced is so large that it becomes nearly impossible to overcome. (although it could have been overcome in other ways)

In other words, the article misses the forest for the trees, which was kind of the whole point (that I remember at least) of the film.
-Jeremy

But guilty people are almost certainly acquitted in a good many trials, and in other cases, there's never enough evidence to even bring someone to trial. An incorrect acquittal is certainly a realistic possibility in a story about jury deliberations. And far from meaning that we need to bring our system back to the drawing board, such stories often make the point that it's better for a guilty person to go free than for an innocent person to be convicted (you may not agree with that point, but it's a fairly common one both in fiction and in real-life commentary on the legal system). I see no compelling reason why the Kid has to be innocent in order for the drama to work--as Threeperf35 pointed out, the film isn't about the defendent's guilt or innocence.

I didn't think the case the poster made for the guilt of the defendant was at all convincing. It reminded me of the typical argument for atheism you would read on the internet.

The case Fonda makes in the movie for reasonable doubt is much more convincing.

While ludicrously off-topic, I wonder if this will set off any fireworks here.

Are you trying to start a flame war or something?

Yeah those dumb internet posters and their ludicrous refusal to see that the myths of nomadic tribesman from 4000 years ago were intended to be the literal, absolute truth. What a bunch of idiots.

It certainly is the better outcome if a guilty person is (incorrectly) acquitted, even more so in a capital punishment trial. (to quote Henry Fonda: we are talking about someone's life here). The way I see it, the movie would be rather frustrating if there was a strong possibility that the Kid was guilty. There IS a (IMHO faint) possibility that the jurors were wrong (that's not the point of the story), but not strong enough to lend ambiguity to everything. The tone of the movie and story definitely is not noir or cynical.
Just to point out: I myself do not put the US legal system into question - at all.

No it doesn't Ken -- it requires the absence of reasonable doubt.

I am going to ask everyone I know if they have ever had a total absence of reasonable doubt about something, yet not considered themselves certain about it.

(I have a feeling that the only person pedantic enough to consider saying "yes" would be me.)

Well thanks for proving my point lol.

"There are so many different religions, they must all be untrue"

"Religion is dumb, therefore god does not exist"

Self-proclaimed "skeptics" at work lol.