Benedict Chua

“12 Angry Men” portrays the setting of a jury deliberating the outcome of a murder trial over an 18-year-old teen. These twelve jurors needed to reach a unanimous decision of whether the accused was guilty beyond reasonable doubt, before the outcome could be determined. Initially, all the jurors except one voted that the accused was guilty. The protagonist, who voted against the guilty sentence, later managed to persuade the rest of the jury that there was reasonable doubt in the guilty verdict. I found several connections between how the protagonist negotiated his way to turn the jury’s decision around and the proposed methods in Roger Fisher and William Ury's book “Getting to Yes”. These methods include separating the people from the problem; focus on interests, not positions; invent options for mutual gain; objective criteria.