12 Angry Men

The climax of the play is right before the end when the 8th juror says to the 3rd, "It's not your boy. He's someone else."  Everything stops in that moment.  The 3rd  juror thinks that he knows every kid in society;  he thinks they are all the same rotten, disrespectful, violent human beings like his son may have been.  All of his prior notions and prejudices fall away in that one second. The view of children shifts as the jurors' votes shift. Juror #10 thought that kids were born liars. He even tries to insult the foreman by saying, "Stop being a kid, will you?" The pig-headed 3rd juror spits insults too: "What are you, the kid's lawyer or something?", as if it were a crime to defend a child. But Juror #8 refuses to blindly believe all the "facts" presented in the case. He doesn't try to force his opinion on anyone, but rather he simply points out the flaws in their arguments. As Juror 11 points out, "Facts may be colored by the personalities of the people that present them." That is exactly what I think Jurors 3, 4 and 10 were trying to do. But the 8th juror was able to appeal to the 3rd's humanity and reconcile his past. We never find out who really killed the father, but that is not what's important in this play. This play is about children being caught in tough positions and having a group of peers see with an objective eye what he really has gone through.