Compelling and exciting movie, but legally illiterate

Rating: 6/10 (1 August 2018)

12 Angry men has for a long time been on my list of what I would consider the best movies ever made. When a movie that merely displays a couple of people sitting in a room talking to one another can have you on the edge of your seat, then it's surely doing something right. However, recently my opinion on the movie changed. Why, you may ask? Because it makes no sense legally. The film is about a jury that has to decide whether there is evidence of a murder beyond a reasonable doubt, which means exactly what it implies. There has to be a reasonable doubt for them not to convict the person, not absence of any doubt at all. Evidence is almost never 100% confirmatory, fingerprints or DNA don't say anyting definitive and witnesses can lie. But when there is a lot of evidence and all of it is pointing in one direction (as is the case in the movie), then the standard of reasonable doubt has surely been reached. This movie makes no legal sense and has been misinforming people on the way the law works for decades now. It's still great in it's acting and the excitement that it's able to bring to table, but whole premise doesn't make sense.