53 pages • 1 hour read
Reginald RoseTwelve Angry Men
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1954A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Act IChapter Summaries & Analyses
Act I Summary
The play opens in a jury room in New York City, 1957, which will be the setting for the entire action of the play. A judge speaks off-stage, telling the jurors that they must now begin their deliberations. Their verdict concerns a first-degree murder charge. The accused is a young boy suspected of murdering his father. As the judge emphasizes, a verdict of “guilty” will result in a mandatory death sentence for the accused.
The 12 jurors then enter the room. It takes a while for the deliberations to begin, as the jurors continue chatting amongst themselves or seek refreshment. During this time, several jurors express impatience, while others appear quiet and withdrawn. When the deliberations begin, the 1st Juror/Foreman calls a preliminary vote: There are 11 votes for “guilty” and only 1 vote for “not guilty.” The “not guilty” vote belongs to the 8th Juror, whose dissent astonishes the others. The 8th Juror explains his vote by saying, “There were eleven votes for ‘guilty.’ It’s not easy for me to raise my hand and send a boy off to die without talking about it first” (Act I, 22). The 8th Juror asks for an hour of deliberations; the other jurors agree.
The 8th Juror reflects upon the difficult upbringing of the accused, who is only 16 years old. He reminds the other jurors that the accused comes from an impoverished background with an abusive, criminal father. The 10th Juror objects to this, claiming that the jurors “don’t owe him [the accused] a thing,” and that the members of the ethnic and/or socioeconomic group to which the accused belongs are all “born liars” (Act I, 23).
The jurors then agree that each of the “guilty”-voting jurors will explain their reasoning to the 8th Juror in an attempt to sway his vote. In the ensuing discussion, we learn more details about the case: There were two witnesses to the crime, the murder occurred shortly after midnight in the family’s apartment, and one witness heard the boy shout “I’m gonna kill you” at his father (Act 1, 25). There was then the sound of a body falling, and the accused fled the apartment. The accused returned later and, when the police questioned him, claimed to have been at the movies, though he could not immediately remember which films he had seen. One of the witnesses is an old man who lived in the apartment underneath the accused’s; the other is a woman who saw the murder from across the street and through the windows of a passing train. Since the relationship between the accused and his father was violently abusive, the 6th Juror argues that the accused had a strong motive to murder his father. The accused also already has an extensive juvenile criminal record. The 8th Juror counters, “Well, I don’t think it’s a very strong motive. This boy has been hit so many times that violence is practically a normal state of affairs for him” (Act I, 27).
Tensions flare up between the jurors when the 4th Juror claims that children from slum backgrounds are potentially dangerous to society, which angers the 5th Juror, as he grew up in a slum himself and still works in one. The 10th Juror and the Foreman also argue. The 8th Juror explains his hesitancy, admitting that while the accused “looks guilty” (Act I, 30), the entire case against him rests on circumstantial evidence and the testimony of the two eyewitnesses. He urges the others to consider the possibility that the witnesses may be wrong. They send for the murder weapon—a switchblade knife—and argue about the fact that the accused bought a similar knife on the night of the crime. The knife is supposedly unique, but the 8th Juror produces an identical one and claims to have purchased it in the accused’s neighborhood. A second vote is held, and the 9th Juror changes his vote to “not guilty.” The 9th Juror argues that the 8th Juror is making a principled stand and that he too would like to hear more.
The jurors continue to argue about the evidence, with the 8th Juror offering doubts and alternative perspectives to counter each piece of evidence. He argues that the elderly eyewitness could not have heard the accused yell any threat due to the noise of a passing train, and that he is too old and slow to have reached the door in time to witness the accused fleeing the apartment. The 9th Juror argues that the elderly eyewitness is perhaps testifying more out of a desire for attention than the truth. The 5th Juror eventually changes his vote to “not guilty.” As the arguments about the validity of the witness testimony grow more heated, the 8th Juror provokes the 3rd Juror, who comes close to attacking him.
Act I Analysis
There are two main opposing forces in Twelve Angry Men, and the play’s key thematic preoccupations are set in motion very early on in Act I. The main dramatic conflict lies in the clash between the prejudiced, narrow-minded thinking of many of the jurors and the commitment to “reasonable doubt” the 8th Juror represents. While the 11 other jurors enter the jury room already persuaded of the accused’s guilt, the 8th Juror’s act of dissent carves out a space for doubt and debate that drives the action of the play. This clash of conviction speaks to one of the dangers of the American justice system: While everyone is guaranteed a fair trial in theory, the prejudices of ordinary jurors make this difficult to implement in practice.
The facts of the case make it clear that the accused is from a disadvantaged community—a background that contrasts with the economic prosperity of jurors such as the 3rd (a self-made businessman), the 4th (a broker), the 7th (a salesman), and the 12th (an advertising agent). The deeply prejudiced, hateful “us and them” rhetoric of the 10th Juror also implies that the accused may be from the African American community in Harlem. The accused has thus faced multiple barriers in his life and has endured continuous poverty and violence. The portrait of the accused in Twelve Angry Men therefore raises questions as to whether or not American democracy provides true equality of rights and opportunities for all its citizens.
The 3rd Juror’s characterization demonstrates a preoccupation with social order and the traditional authority of a father, and his speeches on this topic introduce one of the other key elements in the play. The 3rd Juror sneers at “tough kids” like the accused and claims that society ought to “[slap] ’em down before they make trouble” (Act I, 16). He also laments the lack of respect that “kids nowadays” show toward their parents and reveals that he has been estranged from his own son for two years (Act 1, 28). Since the relationship between the accused and his father was also abusive, the 3rd Juror’s relationship with his own son functions as a mirror of that relationship within the jury room, suggesting that familial problems transcend barriers of race and class. The 3rd Juror’s estrangement from his son is also the basis for his behavior as a juror: It becomes increasingly clear that his hatred for the accused reflects his bitterness toward his own son. As the 8th Juror says at the close of the act, “[Y]ou’ve been behaving like a self-appointed public avenger […] You want to see this boy die because you personally want it, not because of the facts” (Act I, 62). This moment of inflamed tension between the 8th and 3rd Jurors at the act’s close foreshadows the final confrontation that will occur between them at the end of the play.
