Can a person's life be put at risk by measuring human emotions?
How can 12 men yelling at each other for 106 minutes create an interesting and gripping movie? How can 12 men trapped in a room save one man's life thanks to just one person? Is the legal system fair enough? Can emotions such as empathy and prejudice get in the way of law and justice?
The movie 12 Angry Men was released in black and white in 1957. The film, which was nominated for 3 Oscars, focuses on justice, empathy, and law. The film takes place in a jury room that is in the decision-making phase. This jury consists of the public by the American legal system, and no one other than the jury can participate in this conversation during the jury's deliberation. In addition, for the jury's decision to pass, all 12 jurors must vote in the same direction.
In the movie, a young man is tried for murdering his father. When we get to the jury room, everyone except jury number 8 concludes that the man is guilty and votes accordingly. Thanks to jury number 8, the debate begins and the man on trial is saved from going to the electric chair. Throughout the film, the jury debates whether the man is truly guilty or not. Some of them have a very clear attitude, they seem like they will never change their decision, but at the end of the movie, 12 jurors vote that the man is not guilty and they save the man's life.
So how does this incident start? When jury number 8 votes not guilty, the other jury members become angry with him. They argue why other jurors are wasting their time and the man is clearly guilty. However, jury number 8 does not think the child is innocent. He just says there isn't enough evidence and that he can't lead someone to death without enough evidence.
Juror number 8 does not know the man on trial and does not know who he is. So how can he come to such a conclusion? How can he defend someone he doesn't know at all? During the discussion, he repeatedly says to other jurors to put themselves in the shoes of the man on trial. However, another jury says, "But we know what the vagabonds who grew up in that slum are." Hearing this, another juror tells him that he also grew up poor in a slum, and the atmosphere becomes tense. Perhaps this is why the American legal system selects juries from the public completely at random. Different perspectives and different backgrounds focus on the same event and are forced to make a common decision.
Perhaps the most important part of the film is that after one of the last two jurors who did not change their decision prejudice marginalizes the man on trial, everyone at the table turns their backs on that man. One by one, almost all the jurors rise from their chairs and turn away. The same people agreed with these judgments at the beginning of the film. However, after listening to the ideas of Jury 8 and being convinced, their eyes are open and they realize the prejudice. After this impressive scene in the movie, we can see that all the juries no longer look negatively at the man on trial and treat him as if he were a normal person.
It is something that we have been told since primary school that empathy is the right thing to do. At the end of the movie, we cannot find out whether the man on trial is guilty or not. Therefore, the jury members may have freed a murderer or saved an innocent child who was subjected to violence by his father. Human emotions may also have overtaken the legal system. In other words, the empathy of jury number 8 may also be completely wrong.
But there is only one thing we know, and that is that jury number 8 changed the bias of the other jurors. If jury number 8 had made the same bias, that man would be dead. We can understand that the reason why other juries made this decision was bias, as they still thought the man was guilty even after some evidence was refuted and did not change their harsh decisions.
Human emotions will be part of the human decision anyway. Without these emotions, we would be no different than artificial intelligence. We can never make our decisions completely objectively. What we experience and see will affect our decisions, but this does not mean that we cannot reach the right decision by listening to other people and learning about their past. On the contrary, when different people come to a common decision, as in this movie, the probability of that decision being correct increases.
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