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Jury Duty - a Teen on Trial for Murder

Imagine that you are serving on a jury that has heard the following criminal case against an 18 year old Puerto Rican-American boy accused of knifing his father to death.

The prosecution case:

The boy’s record shows him to be troubled. When he was ten, he was in children's court; he threw a rock at a teacher. When he was fifteen, he was in reform school; he stole a car. He's been arrested for mugging. He was picked up twice for knife fighting... “They say he's real handy with a knife.”
The people across the hall from the boy’s apartment testified that they heard a fight or argument between the father and boy around 8 o'clock that evening. The father hit the boy twice and they saw the boy run angrily out of the house.
After leaving the house at 8, the boy went to a neighborhood “junk shop” where he bought a switch-blade knife with a “very unusual carved handle and blade.” At 8:45, he met some friends in front of a tavern and talked with them for about an hour. The boy's friends identified the "death weapon" in court as the "very same knife" that the boy had with him.
At 12 minutes past midnight the man living in the apartment beneath the one where the killing took place heard loud noises. He testified it was a fight going on in the room above his. He also heard the kid yell out: “I'm gonna kill ya.” Then, a second later, he heard a body hit the floor. The old man ran to his door, opened it, and saw the kid running down the stairs and out of the house.
The coroner fixed the time of death at around midnight.
The woman in the building directly across the street was lying in bed unable to sleep because of the heat. (Elevated train tracks run down the middle of the street, but from her bed she can see out her bedroom window and through the train windows into the boy’s apartment as trains go by.) She testified that looking out her window and “right across the street,” she saw the kid “stick the knife” into his father at precisely 12:10 am.
The boy's alibi was “flimsy.” He claimed that he was at the movies at the time of the killing, yet one hour later, he couldn't remember the names of the films he saw or who played in them. And no one saw him going in or out of the theatre.

The defense case:

The boy said that the knife fell through a hole in his pocket on the way to the movies and that he never saw it again.
The boy arrived home at around 10 o'clock, and said he went to a movie about 11:30 pm, returning home at 3:10 am “to find his father dead and himself arrested.”

Here are the judge’s instructions: “If there's a reasonable doubt in your minds as to the guilt of the accused, a reasonable doubt, then you must bring me a verdict of not guilty. If however, there is no reasonable doubt, then you must in good conscience find the accused guilty. However you decide, your verdict must be unanimous.”

How do you vote, guilty or not guilty?

After you and your students finish with the situation above, explain that it is a summary of the case at the center of a 1950s television drama that was made into an award-winning film. As the film is widely available on DVD, you may want to show and discuss it as a follow up. Whenever I have done so, students initially grouse when they see a black and white film beginning, but all succumb to the power of this film almost immediately. I usually show it over two class periods, and students can't wait for the second day.

12 Angry Men is available at Amazon.com

The Wikipedia article on 12 Angry Men

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