Have Liberals Forsaken Due Process?

In the archives of legal fiction, one character most consciously embodied liberal self-perception. That was Juror #8, the character played by Henry Fonda in the 1957 movie, Twelve Angry Men.

In his screenplay notes, Reginald Rose described #8 as “a man who sees all sides of every question and constantly seeks the truth. A man of strength tempered with compassion. Above all, he is a man who wants justice to be done and will fight to see that it is.”

Not one for nuance, Rose described #8′s nemesis, Juror #3, played by Lee J. Cobb in the film, as “a humorless man who is intolerant of opinions other than his own and accustomed to forcing his wishes and views upon others.” This being the mid-fifties, Juror #3 served as the inevitable Joe McCarthy proxy. In the film, he allied himself with Juror #10, “a bigot who places no values on any human life save his own.” Such was the profile of the conservative in the liberal mind nearly sixty years ago. Not much has changed about that profile in the years since.

What has changed, however, or at least what has seemed to, is the liberal concept of the good juror. “Maddy,” the one minority juror in the George Zimmerman trial, found this out the hard way. Although the public was told repeatedly that there were no blacks on the six-woman jury, the Puerto Rican Maddy is clearly of African descent.

After carefully reviewing evidence for sixteen hours, Maddy voted with her fellow jurors to acquit Zimmerman of second-degree murder in the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

“I was the juror that was going to give them the hung jury,” Maddy said on ABC’s Good Morning America shortly after the trial.