A Debate on "Twelve Angry Men":

Via Overlawyered, you can find a harsh critique of the classic jury deliberation movie here, and a vigorous defense here.

I saw the movie many years ago, but I remember that my reaction was that Henry Fonda raised many questions that should have been asked by the defense lawyer (e.g., maybe an eyewitness wasn't wearing her eyeglasses), raising two possibilities: (1) that the defense lawyer was incompetent; or (2) that the defense lawyer knew that the answers wouldn't have helped his client. This raised, to me, a broader issue: to meet his burden of proof, does a prosecutor need to anticipate and rebut all possible objections, even those not actually raised by the defense attorney, or is it enough for the jury to determine that if one accepts the evidence placed before them by the two sides, the prosecutor has the overwhelmingly stronger case?

Related Posts (on one page):

  1. 12AM:
  2. Twelve Angry Men and the Cumulative Weight of Evidence:
  3. A Debate on "Twelve Angry Men":