Prejudice in Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose

On a jury, feelings of prejudice are supposed to be suppressed. However, many people have difficulty ignoring their negative feelings toward others who are different. This situation can lead to incorrect assumptions and possibly impulsive guilty verdicts. Throughout 12 angry men, prejudice is seen in nearly every juror. This leads to false arguments based on ethnicity, age, and looks. In this essay I will be presenting four examples in which prejudice is seen in Twelve Angry Men, and how these examples show how prejudice interferes in the course of justice.

This first example shows how personal experience can affect your point of view in a situation and how basing it off of what you have experienced may blur the line between assumptions and facts. In act one, page 14, Juror 3 says, 'That man's a dangerous killer. You could see it.' Here, he is assuming that a killer must 'look' a certain way, indicating his prejudice against those who look like the defendant. He follows that comment with the statement: 'They sent him to reform school for stabbing someone.' He assumes that because the kid might have stabbed someone in the past, he is certainly guilty in this case.

Juror Three also implies his prejudice against the young male defendant when he says “this kid is guilty. He’s got to burn. We’re letting him slip through our fingers here.” He’s most likely prejudiced against the young male defendant due to his experiences with his own son. He got in a fight with his son, son punched him, ran away, and hasn’t seen him since. We see this on page 18 when he says 'Yeah, well I’ve got one. He’s twenty. We did everything for that boy, and what happened? When he was sixteen we had a battle. He hit me in the face. He’s big, y’ know. I haven’t seen him in two years. Rotten kid.' This just further explains his prejudice by suggesting that he has a negative view of all young men. Juror 3 is only able to see the young boy on trial like his son, therefore he is unable to look past his own anger towards his son and see the case for what it really is.

Throughout Act One we see that all the jurors judge each other based on how they look, sound, and even for how much money they have or make. This prejudice is noticeable when Juror Three says of Juror Four, “Ask him to hire you. He’s rich. Look at that suit!”.

Another form of prejudice is seen in Juror 7, juror 7 completely doesn't care about the case or the fact and is perfectly willing to let the innocent man die or the guilty man goes free, as long as he makes it to the baseball game. Further on, we see that he’s ethnocentric and somewhat racist due to him insulting the immigrant Juror 11. When he switches his vote to 'Not Guilty' because he had enough, juror 11 gets mad and basically attacks him by saying that he has no right to play like this with the man's life. Juror 7 talks back at Juror 11, stating that he’s superior as an American citizen. Juror 7 and 11 constantly had arguments due to juror 7s unnecessary comments, which were mainly based around juror 11s ethnicity.

In conclusion, prejudice is everywhere throughout Twelve angry men, some of it is just hard to see due to it being subtle. Prejudice is mainly seen in juror 3, 7, and 10, but there’s a possibility that every juror has some type of prejudice, whether it be ethnic prejudice, self-experience, doubt, or even just not caring. In general, prejudice in a jury can lead to incorrect assumptions and impulsive guilty verdicts which may then lead to an innocent person be sent to jail or the electric chair.