Act One

The play "Twelve Angry Men" by Reginald Roses is a play about 12 jurors who are discussing whether the 19-year-old teenage boy who is accused of stabbing his father with a switch knife. The play starts with the judge talking in the background about what the jurors have to do. The play then goes on to the jurors settling into the room.

In the first act, we are told the background of the trial and the details that were given to help prove the case of being guilty or not guilty. The jurors all take a vote and 11 out of the 12 of them voted that the suspect was guilty. The 11 jurors that thought the suspect was guilty were explaining why they voted guilty to the juror that voted not guilty. As the one juror was listening he kept making points as to why they might have falsely accused the suspect, but never once tried to convince them that they had to change their mind.

By the end of the first act, the juror that pleaded not guilty had made many truthful statements, and had proven every one of them, as to why what the other jurors considered to be guilty could have been falsely accused. While making those statements, the other jurors began to take into consideration what the not guilty juror was saying and started to reconsider the vote they made. At the end of the first act, the not guilty juror convinced the other jurors to take another vote and that if he is still the only one that believes the suspect is not guilty, he would plead guilty too. If there is another person that thinks the suspect is not guilty, then they would have to look at all the facts closely and come up with an agreement as to what the verdict should be.

Has there ever been a time in your life where you were the only person that saw both sides of a story and were trying to get the other people to see the other side?