ATTENTION! You have been called for jury duty in the case of a teenage boy stabbing his father. Imagine getting this in the mail. That was me the other day. Just as I was about to settle down for a nice, afternoon nap, BOOM, this got thrown in my lap. There was no nap happening for me that day. I know that it shouldn’t bother me, that I should be happy that this is a right that we have in this country, but nobody likes the inconvenience of jury duty. However, as a recent member of the jury in the case of 12 Angry Men, it did occur to me that there should be some changes to our justice system. The jurors should be able to speak while the case is in the courtroom, and not have to wait until the case goes to the deliberation room to discuss ideas.…show more content… If the defendant gets a bad, not interested lawyer, which the boy in this case certainly did, the jury could propose some questions that may help them out. In the instance of the woman with the glasses, as well as the old man that lived in the apartment below the boy, if questions had been asked, it could have swung the case back in the favor of the defendant, because it was very much in favor of the prosecution. When first going back to the deliberation room, we took a vote to see where everybody stood on the guilt or innocence of the boy. I was the only one that voted that he was not guilty, everybody else thought that the witnesses and the prosecution’s case were good enough to prove that the boy was guilty. If the boy’s lawyer, which had been appointed to him, had not left so many questions unasked, this might have been different. That is where we as jurors would have come in, if we had the legal ability to demand that there be some situations recreated, such as the woman doing an eye test without her glasses, and the man seeing if he could walk that far that fast. Another potentially convincing piece of evidence was the fact that the knife was one-of-a-kind. According to the storekeeper that sold the boy the knife, “It’s a very unusual knife. The storekeeper...said it was the only one of it’s kind that he had in stock”(Rose…show more content… However, I do not think that they would outweigh the good. In the case I was previously a member of, the possibility of the bads overtaking the goods was definitely prevalent, but if the boy had been given a better lawyer, that would not have been the case. One reason that it could be a bad thing is if the members of the jury had a lot of questions and wanted to be shown a lot of demonstrations. For example, Juror 3, as well as me, most likely would have had a lot of things to say, and this could make the case go on forever. According to the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, “the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy...trial”. Even without the jury talking at all, the case already took six days. I am not sure if that would qualify as speedy, and having comments made from the jury box would likely have made it last much longer. Similarly, and another thing that would be a negative, is that if the jury kept making comments, and wanting to see recreated situations, the case would be interrupted a lot. There would be the chance that nobody in the courtroom could ever make a complete comment, or make a complete point, without one of the twelve putting their two cents into it. This would lead to a lot of breaks in the case, with neither side really getting anywhere, because all of their testimonies get tested or shot down. A final negative that would be there in all cases would be when a
