| Summary |
"About a young Puerto Rican boy in New York City who is accused of stabbing his father on the basis of two eyewitness. One of them, the woman looked out the window of her bedroom while in bed at midnight - which is 60’ away across the elevated L (electric) train tracks separating the two buildings. The other eyewitness, a man living directly below the murdered man and his son claims he heard the boy say “I’m going to kill you,” just before he heard a thud on the floor above him, and ran to his door and saw the boy running down the stairs. After initially voting 11-1 for conviction, Fonda was able to convince all 12 jurors, including himself, that the boy was innocent, and the two “eyewitnesses” were mistaken, and the supposed murder weapon - a knife - that the prosecution said was rare, was easily obtainable in the neighborhood were the boy lived. After court one day, Fonda went to a pawn shop two blocks away and bought one just like it. 'This was the one time in their lives when the two eyewitnesses were in the spotlight, the woman was so vain that she didn’t want to wear her eyeglasses in court - which is how her false testimony was eventually discovered by the jury. She wasn’t wearing her glasses when she looked across the tracks - and hence couldn’t have recognized anyone, and the old man had a bad leg and limped so much that when the jurors recreated his walk to the stair landing, it took them 43 seconds, and not the 15 seconds he claimed it took him. The movie is an indictment of the entire prosecutorial process - that didn’t do the investigation and fact finding the jury did - prior to trying to obtain a conviction and death sentence against the innocent son." |