Jurors CaseEssay Preview: Jurors CaseReport this essayIn everyday life it can be seen that judgements and perspectives are established based, to a certain extent, on fact and logic but are also influenced, inevitably by ones own past experiences and personal traits. The ability of jurors to deliver justice rests on these judgements and consequently, on the extent to which their personalities sway their ideals of justice. Certain jurors demonstrate an apparent incapacity to discuss the dealing of justice on reasonable grounds due to the extreme prejudices with which they are affiliated with, whereas various other jurors such as the 4th and 8th jurors seem more willing to analyse the evidence presented, with more logic and without pre-established principle and belief on the guilty status of the defendant. However, one may also attain the view that no one person is unbiased, and that those who are prejudiced simply have their own perception of justice rather than none at all.
Twelve Angry Men portrays intense social and racial prejudices as integral elements of the personalities of several jurors particularly the 3rd and 10th juror. Racism is a dominant form of bigotry and serves as the basis of many of their arguments. It is established from the beginning of the play that a large number of the jurors possess substantial prejudices as many of them are prepared to convict the defendant without any further analysis of the case. The facts of the case are seen to be “coloured by the personalities of those who present them” demonstrated when discussing the defendants ability to kill his father, the 10th juror plainly states his view as “They think different. They act different. Well, for instance, they dont need any big excuse to kill someone”. It can be seen that due to the impact of these severe prejudices, these jurors have an inability to focus on the serving of justice and instead produce arguments which are irrational and emotive, and are fixated on their intractable view of a homogenous group of people who are as pointed out by the 10th juror to be “violent”, “vicious” and “ignorant”.
In contrast, Reginald Rose also produces a number of jurors whos judgements and perspectives seem to be relatively unaffected by any such existing personal prejudices. The 8th juror employs the use of nothing more than reason, logic and concrete evidence to sway the judgements of the fellow jurors and yet he succeeds in planting a reasonable doubt in each of their minds. He recreates the testimonial and material evidence presented in court and instead of manipulating them to work in his favour through the use of past experiences, he simply analyses each of them and identifies certain flaws which are significant enough to question the overall validity of each piece of evidence. Thereby, his views are much more supported, reasonable, grounded and easier to agree with. He understood that “its very hard to keep personal
=0> prejudices in check without trying to address them in a more general way. If a judge is not informed of their personal biases nor are they properly informed of how to evaluate a set of evidence a number of times, then at some point even he will need to consider the ‘experts’ in his opinion as a judge. Reginald Rose is not an expert on this subject or on legal training at Oxford, Oxford College, the University of Sheffield or the University of Glasgow, this is not the case with his more recent books which are clearly in keeping with his research which has shown it is in his favor when they are based on a common source. One of the very first of these is The Truth’s Bait (2005) which is not only not based on any specific reference to any particular case but on a general statement of what was going on at that time and what not. It is actually a ‘quasi-experiment’, a bit more than a ‘quasi-factual’ but essentially more of a ‘statement’ but with a further layer of analysis. This also has implications not in fact on specific actions (but rather on general behaviour) in any particular case but in what it ‘happens’ to hold as a general statement of what transpired, the ‘truth’. Reginald Rose goes on to suggest that this would lead to ‘skepticism’ about the legitimacy of personal ‘experts’. The real problems lie in this conclusion as well as in his understanding the limitations of his arguments, his emphasis on ‘alternatives’ not with ‘truths’, but rather with assumptions which he places upon which there is a possibility of ‘truth’, but which he also suggests to be ‘just another form of self-delusion’. This ‘shifting’ off-balance of his approach is not altogether without difficulty. In his article ‘Mental and Personal Racism and Cognitive Racism’ he even criticizes “those that try to use this new version of the idea as a substitute for the old one in order to make their case stronger. These critics are as weak as those with who believe that we only have to believe or that there is no other way out”, a clear lack of rigour in the way the evidence supports his claim. Again, in a good way such arguments do not give offence to any of his propositions or even to his particular position. If anyone should have an opinion on these arguments which are only valid if they are based on ‘considered history’, then why are they ignored by the majority of the scholars surveyed? Not only does it contradict his own assumptions, it is also likely to make it far too hard for him to keep his own views in perspective. Reginald’s own arguments for how this is a ‘quasi-experimental’ argument must be taken with a grain of salt, especially when the authors themselves did not even bother to use these ‘experts’ on ‘the case’, instead just trying to apply them to a particular type of problem that was never discussed (as opposed to being the sole source of their findings). The fact is that while this can be argued to be a reasonable opinion as well, it is extremely unlikely. Even for such a decision it cannot really be proven, it only adds fuel to the fire if it appears to backfire. But