Huge spoilers ahead!
The jury, in particular the main protagonist, seemed to wade into illegal territory more than once. But being a complete layman who’s never been on a jury, I don’t know for sure.
Doing one’s own research and bringing one’s own “evidence” into the jury room, and not presenting it to the prosecution or defence, seems like a no no. The knife the protagonist finds in a store and brings in to show his fellow jurists that the prosecutor was wrong about its uniqueness; this feels like mistrial levels of inappropriate. Making judgements about credibility based on whether or not someone was wearing their glasses in court by noticing their nose has the telltale markings of a glasses wearer, something not pointed to by the defence as worthy of note, likewise seems off limits.
Is it not the case that the jury has to work only with information and evidence presented during the trial? And in fact can be told to ignore certain evidence from the trial if the judge deems it stricken from the record? Is it expected or acceptable for jurists to come up with their own alternate scenarios and narratives that fit the evidence or are they bound only to consider the theories presented by the defence and the prosecution?
Perhaps in the '50s this was all above board but the law changed since then. Or maybe my movie-based understanding of juries is a Frankenstein mishmash of true and bullshit. Probably that.
Great film deserving of its place atop “best films ever” lists, and I even liked the '90s remake!
First off, it’s been a decade or two since I saw the movie. That said, there’s a bunch of questionable content there, but I would argue that noticing and pointing out the glasses indentations isn’t one of them. People do notice and put emphasis on different things.
For example, in this old reddit thread, a man is a dead ringer for a robbery suspect, down to the clothes he was wearing. But one person on the jury was a professional seamstress, and pointed out that the sewn-in pleats on the shirt the man was wearing vs the pleats on the suspect’s shirt were completely different. No one - not the prosecutor, the defendant’s lawyers, not the judge, not the defendant himself - noticed the seams or thought they were significant. But that seamstress did.
In both cases, this wasn’t something they sought out to bring in from the outside, it was knowledge that they already had that they applied to the case. And I would argue that that’s part of the responsibility of a jury. If I was on a jury listening to an audio recording that included … I dunno, a plane engine or a train engine, and there was a plane mechanic or a train enthusiast on the jury, I would hope they’d point out whether the recording with the engine did or didn’t match the suspect’s. Because I certainly couldn’t tell engine sounds apart, but someone who’s around them all day could, and that’s certainly relevant information.