The 3rd Juror serves as the antagonist of the play. He is a man so gripped by his personal history and his discriminatory beliefs that he's unable to impartially perceive reality. Early in the play, he tells the story of his relationship with his own son, admitting that he beat the boy in order to make a man out of him. As a result, the 3rd Juror is estranged from his son, and throughout the deliberations he feels an unspoken affinity with the murdered father. He can see that, like the father, he treated his son with violence and in some way drove him away, but he’s unable to fully take responsibility for that outcome and instead sees himself as a victim of his own son’s rejection. This personal history makes it impossible for him to judge the accused boy on the merits of his case. Instead, he judges the boy incredibly harshly, and the more the other jurors change their minds, the more entrenched in his own perspective he becomes. In contrast to the 8th Juror, the 3rd Juror responds not with reason, logic, and compassion but with anger and emotion. He is less interested in due process and more interested in seeing the boy receive punishment. In fact, the more he encounters reason and logic, the more unhinged he becomes. This culminates in the 3rd Juror breaking down, admitting that he can feel the knife going into his own body because of his feelings about his lost son. This also serves as his own confession that he sees he has been an unreliable and vengeful juror. In total defeat, he can finally relent as the final juror to vote not guilty. Thus, the 3rd Juror represents the dangers of the judicial system held in the wrong hands and how personal biases have the potential to render wrongful convictions.