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Summary: Act I, Part 1
The jury room of a New York Court of Law, 1957. A very hot summer afternoon.
8TH JUROR: That’s right. It isn’t.
The play opens on an empty jury room. It is large and shabby with a table in the center with twelve chairs around it. Outside the windows, New York City is visible. Attached to the jury room, a washroom is partially visible. Extra chairs and a bench are strewn about the room, along with pads, pencils, and ashtrays. Though there are no people in the room, the judge’s voice can be heard, giving the twelve members of the jury instructions on how to deliberate about the first-degree murder case they just heard. A 16-year-old boy stands accused of stabbing his father to death. The judge reminds the jury that they must deliver a not-guilty verdict if they have reasonable doubt. In the event of a guilty verdict, the boy will face the death penalty.
The 12 men of the jury, known only by their juror numbers, enter the room. They begin to talk about the heat and the fact that this is the hottest day of the year. The 7th Juror is very impatient because he has tickets to a ballgame that evening and wants to get the vote over with. Many of the jurors treat the case as though it’s open and shut and that it’s obvious the boy is guilty. The 10th Juror make a racist comment, assuming the boy is guilty because of his race. The jurors take a preliminary vote. Eleven vote “guilty,” and the 8th Juror votes “not guilty.” Many of the jurors are angry about this. The 8th Juror says that he’s unsure what he thinks, and because a man’s life is at stake, he thinks they should take the time to discuss the case. The 7th Juror is especially impatient, and the 8th Juror asks him to talk for an hour, reminding him he can still make the game. The 8th Juror argues for compassion since the boy has had a hard life, while the 10th Juror makes more racist comments, saying that people of the defendant’s race are born liars. The 9th Juror, who is an older man, tells the 10th Juror that he’s ignorant. They go around the table in order and try and convince the 8th Juror that the boy is guilty.
The 2nd Juror says he feels it was obvious from the start that the boy was guilty. The 3rd Juror is convinced by the testimony of the boy’s downstairs neighbor, an old man who said that he heard the boy shout, “I’m gonna kill you.” The old man said he then heard a body fall and saw the boy run down the stairs seconds later. The 4th Juror feels that the boy’s alibi – being at the movies – is flimsy because he couldn’t remember what movie he saw. The 10th Juror interrupts to bring up the second witness, a woman who lived across the street from the boy. She testified that she saw the boy murder his father through the windows of a passing elevated train. The 8th Juror asks the 10th Juror why he believes the woman but not the boy, given that they are the same race.
The 5th Juror, a night nurse, chooses not to speak as they go around the table. The 6th Juror points out that the boy has a motive, because the neighbors testified the boy’s father hit him earlier in the evening. The 8th Juror argues that it isn’t a very strong motive because the boy had been hit his entire life, so it’s questionable that it would suddenly make him homicidal. The 7th Juror is convinced the defendant is guilty because the boy has a history of violence and minor crimes. The 3rd Juror interrupts to talk about how angry kids in general are. He tells a story about how, when his son was nine, he saw him walk away from a fight and it made him sick. He vowed to “make a man” out of his son. His son hit him back when he was 16, and they haven’t spoken in two years. He is embarrassed about his disclosure. The 4th and 10th Jurors say that kids in slums are menaces. The 5th Juror, who grew up in and still nurses in a slum, takes offense. The jurors get into a fight about how to discuss the case. The 8th Juror begins to question how competent the boy’s lawyer was and said there was a lot of circumstantial evidence in the trial.
Analysis
From the beginning of the play, the heat serves as a motif and a physical reminder of the intense emotional pressure the men are under. It is a relentlessly hot day, the hottest of the year, and there’s no relief from the swelter in the jury room as the air conditioner and the fan don’t work. This parallels the way that, throughout the jury’s deliberation, there’s no escape from the intensity of their situation. The twelve men hold the fate of one boy in their hands, and there’s nothing they can do to evade their responsibility or make their decision easier. The jurors’ attempts to speed the process along fail. The heat also makes the men more irritable and angrier. The 6th Juror says that he almost dropped dead from the heat in court, which parallels the way each of the jurors must relinquish their egos to the process and let their assumptions and biases die in the boiler room of due process.
This section introduces the theme of the power of racism to impact judgement. The boy’s three staunchest prosecutors on the jury are the 3rd, 4th, and 10th Jurors, each of whom makes an argument threaded with racist ideology. The 10th Juror is single-minded in his belief that the boy is guilty because of his race. As the discussion proceeds, he becomes increasingly insistent about enacting vigilante justice on the boy – bringing down a guilty verdict regardless of the law or due process – in order to carry out his own racist agenda. Each point of his argument is based on his ideas about people of the boy’s race, and as soon as he begins speaking in this manner, the 9th Juror calls him ignorant. This equates the 10th Juror’s racist ideology with an inability to intelligently perceive reality. Stuck in his biased narratives, the 10th Juror is unfit to assess the facts and circumstances of the specific case before him.
This section also explores the motif of fathers and sons and the violence and pain that can erupt in father-son relationships. The monologue from the 3rd Juror represents a unique break in the tight focus of the two-act play. It is one of the only times a character discusses their personal life in depth. This suggests that his story about his son is relevant to the case. Both the boy on trial and the 3rd Juror’s son have tumultuous relationships with their fathers. Both boys, it is implied, experienced physical abuse, as the boy on trial was regularly beaten by his father and the 3rd Juror says he “made a man” out of his son through violence. The 3rd Juror sees similarities between the crime that the boy is accused of and the fact that his son is estranged from him. On some level, the 3rd Juror feels like his son has killed something in him by rejecting him. The father-son relationships in the play are dominated by violence and rejection, which seems to cause all parties physical and emotional pain.
