Twelve Angry People

What 12 Angry Men can teach us about the hardest job in a courtroom

I have an opinion about the Lindsay Clancy trial.

A very strong one, actually.

But here's the thing.

I'm not on the jury.

Neither are you.

And that distinction matters.

Because in Massachusetts, twelve people were given the responsibility of deciding the criminal responsibility of another human being.

In this case, that meant more than deciding whether she caused the deaths. It meant deciding whether, at the time, she was capable of understanding the wrongfulness of what she did.

They listened to weeks of evidence. They heard competing interpretations of that evidence. They listened to experts, lawyers and witnesses.

And then they had to decide.

Not what I think.

Not what you think.

Not what the newspapers or the internet think.

What they thought, according to the evidence and the law.

That is an extraordinary responsibility.

And it brought to mind a film made nearly seventy years ago.

12 Angry Men.

If you have never seen it, do yourself a favour.

If you have seen it, watch it again.

Twelve strangers enter a jury room. They have heard the same evidence. They have watched the same trial. They know their decision will profoundly affect another human being.

And yet they do not agree.

That, of course, is the point.

The film isn't really about whether the accused boy is guilty.

It is about the jury.

More particularly, it is about what happens when twelve human beings are required to make an enormous decision while carrying twelve different sets of experiences, prejudices, assumptions, emotions and certainties into the room with them.

Because a jury is not supposed to be twelve people who think alike.

It is twelve people who are required to think together.

The film's lesson is not that one juror was clever enough to change everybody's mind.

It is that he was prepared to question his own certainty.

A jury requires almost the precise opposite of what social media rewards.

Slow down.

Listen.

Consider.

Reconsider.

And that is where our modern world creates a problem that Sidney Lumet and the writers of 12 Angry Men could scarcely have imagined.

The jury in the Clancy case was not sequestered. Jurors were allowed to return home during deliberations, subject to the judge's instructions not to discuss the case or consume material about it.

That is not an accusation against the jurors.

Nor is it evidence that anyone did anything improper.

It is simply the world we now live in.

The world outside that jury room is very different from the one inhabited by those twelve fictional jurors in 1957.

Today, information doesn't have to be sought.

It arrives.

On the phone.

In a feed.

Beneath a video.

As a notification.

Wrapped in a headline designed to make us angry, frightened or sympathetic.

And underneath it are hundreds of people telling us what we should think.

Some will be certain she is guilty.

Some will be certain she is a victim.

Some will insist the entire matter is proof of a broken mental-health system.

There will be experts and self-appointed experts.

People who have read every document.

People who have read nothing beyond a headline.

And they will all have opinions.

That's the extraordinary thing about social media.

You don't have to go looking for an opinion anymore.

An opinion can find you.

And that matters because jurors are not machines.

They are human beings.

We ask them to listen to evidence that may be horrifying, to put aside emotion, and then to sit with eleven strangers until they can speak with one voice.

If they cannot, they have to keep talking.

They did.

For days.

Then they told the judge, more than once, that they could not agree.

After about thirty-six hours over seven days, the judge declared a mistrial.

That does not tell us which side was right.

It tells us the question was hard.

There is a temptation, particularly now, to treat a hung jury as proof that somebody in the room was stupid, biased or obstinate.

12 Angry Men suggests another possibility.

Disagreement is sometimes the beginning of thinking.

Sometimes it is also where thinking ends without a verdict.

That is not necessarily a failure of the form.

It may be the form doing what it was designed to do: refusing to pretend that twelve consciences are one.

There is another thing 12 Angry Men understood clearly.

The jurors gradually stop being twelve people shouting opinions across a table and become twelve people actually examining what they have heard.

The room changes.

Not because somebody waves a magic wand.

Not because everyone suddenly becomes virtuous.

Simply because they begin to think.

That is what we should have wished for the twelve people who sat in the Clancy jury room.

Not that they reach the verdict I would like.

Not that they reach the verdict you would like.

Not even that they reach the verdict the loudest voices outside that courthouse demand.

But that they be able to do the job they were asked to do.

Quietly.

Carefully.

According to the evidence.

According to the law.

And according to their own consciences.

They did not agree.

The verdict, whatever it eventually is—if there is another trial, another twelve—will still belong to a jury.

It does not belong to Facebook.

It does not belong to television commentators.

It does not belong to me.

And it does not belong to you.

Perhaps that is the thing 12 Angry Men understood better than anything else.

A jury is not a popularity poll.

It is not a referendum.

It is not a contest between competing tribes.

It is twelve human beings being asked to carry an enormous weight for a little while.

And perhaps the greatest courtesy we can offer them is to let them carry it.

Without telling them where to put it.