I love Sidney Lumet's Twelve Angry Men, a tale of 12 jurors deciding the fate of a young black ghetto boy who was on trial for the alleged murder of his step father.
The jurors are shown deliberating on a sweltering summer afternoon in a courthouse in New York City. A majority want to go home so they have no problem saying they believe the boy to be guilty; he is after all black, poor and thus criminally inclined.
One juror dissents and puts a spanner in the work of a quick, unanimous verdict. And then begins the arduous process of the dissenting juror slowly and patiently planting the seeds of reasonable doubt--about the boy's guilt--in the minds of the "angry" (and white) males.
That was then--in the pre civil rights era (1957) when the film took a bold turn toward suggesting the racially deeply biased nature of the American judicial system.
This is now--The jurors in the trial of Florida's George Zimmerman are mostly white females, barring one woman who is black/hispanic (juror number B-29). Incidentally, the latter is the sole juror with an arrest record, and she has said she doesn't have the foggiest clue as to why she was arrested. The woman is a transplant from Chicago.
The 5 white and the 1 non-white women found Zimmerman to be non-guilty this evening. The verdict came after a 14 hour deliberation. Apparently, it's okay to hunt down and kill black males like game in the state of Florida (or so some say).
I was surprised to find that on May 11 of this year yet another Florida resident, of Jacksonville, was arrested on charges similar to George Zimmerman's. But the black woman hadn't shot and killed anyone. She had merely fired a gun in order to "scare off" her abusive husband. The state attorney general's office that prosecuted Zimmerman, also prosecuted the woman. They won this case and the jury took a mere 14 minutes to reach the verdict.
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