One last, even more speculative thought:
Literally everything the racist juror does in the back half of the movie is weird and suspicious. It’s strange that he expects people to be convinced by his bigoted tirade; it’s also strangely convenient that he’s willing to vote not guilty by the end even though he A) hasn’t changed his mind and B) knows a hung jury would probably eventually lead to the death of the accused, which he wants.
I don’t think it’s likely, but I’d put maybe a ~1% probability on . . .
. . . him being in league with the protagonist, and them running a two-man con on the other ten jurors to get the unanimous verdict they want.
Thanks for your reply, and (re-)welcome to LW!
I hope so! Let’s discuss.
(Jsyk you can spoiler possible spoilers on Desktop using “>!” at the start of paragraphs, in case you want to make sure no LWers are spoiled on the contents of a most-of-a-century-old play.)
Regarding the witnesses:
I agree—emphatically! - that eyewitness testimony is a lot less reliable than most people believe. I mostly only brought the witnesses up in my discussion because I thought the jury dismissed them for bad reasons, instead of a general policy of “eyewitnesses are unreliable”. (In retrospect, I could have been a lot clearer on this point.)
Regarding the knife:
I agree that the knife being unique would have made things a lot more clear-cut, but disagree about the implications.
If no-one is deliberately trying to frame the accused, the odds of the real killer happening to use the same brand of knife as the one he favors are very low. (What fraction of knives* available to potential suspects are of that exact type? One in a hundred, maybe? If we assume no frame-up or suicide and start with your prior probability of 10% then a naive Bayesian update and a factor of 100 moves that to >90% even without other evidence**.)
If he is actively being framed . . . that’s not overwhelmingly implausible, since it’s not a secret what kind of knife he uses, and the real killer would be highly motivated to shift blame. However, the idea that he’d have lost his knife, by coincidence, at the same time that someone was using an exact duplicate to frame him (and then couldn’t find it afterwards, even though it would be decisive for his defense) . . . strains credulity. I’m less sure about how to quantify the possibility a real killer took his knife without him knowing, got into the victim’s apartment, and performed the kill all while the accused was out at the movies; but I feel pretty confident the accused’s knife was the murder weapon.
*I’m ignoring the effects of the murder weapon being a knife at all because they’re surprisingly weak. The accused owns a knife and favors using it, but so would many alternative suspects; and the accused cohabiting with the victim implies he also has easy access to many alternative methods—poison, arranging an accident—that Hypothetical Killer X wouldn’t.
**Full disclosure, I didn’t actually perform the calculation until I started writing this post; I admit to being surprised by how little a factor of ~100 changes a ~10% prior probability, though I still feel it’s a stronger effect than you’re accounting for, and for that matter think your base rates are too low to start with (the fight wasn’t just a fight, it was the culmination of years of persistent abuse).
Regarding my conspiracy theories:
I agree that the protagonist having ideological or personal reasons to make the case turn out this way is much more likely than him having been successfully bribed or threatened; aside from anything else, the accused doesn’t seem terribly wealthy or well-connected.
I also agree with your analysis of the racist juror’s emotional state as presented, though I continue to think it’s slightly suspicious that things happened to break that conveniently (the Doylist explanation is of course that the director wanted the bigot to come off as weak and/or needed things to wrap up satisfyingly inside a two-hour runtime, but I’m an incorrigible Watsonian.)