ANALYSIS OF EK RUKA HUA FAISLA

STORYLINE
After the final closing arguments are presented, the judge gives his instructions to the jury: The question they are deciding is whether the defendant—a teenage boy from a city slum—stabbed and killed his father. The jury is further instructed that a guilty verdict will be accompanied by a mandatory death sentence. The jury of 12 retires to the jury room, where they spend a short while getting acquainted before they are called to order. All the jury members except one (Mr K.K.Raina) are convinced that the boy is guilty of the crime and that task before them is to reach a unanimous decision to expedite the case. His is the only "not guilty" in a preliminary vote. His stated reason is that there is too much at stake for him to go along with the verdict without at least talking about it first. His vote annoys several of the others, the most vociferous of whom is Juror number 7 who has tickets for the evening's movie show.
The film then revolves around the jury's difficulty in reaching a unanimous verdict, mainly due to several of the jurors' personal prejudices. Juror number 8 says that the evidence presented is circumstantial, and the boy deserves a careful consideration—whereupon he questions the accuracy and reliability of the only two witnesses to the murder, the fact that the knife used in the murder is not as unusual as testimony promotes (to prove his point, he produces an identical one from his pocket), and the overall questionable circumstances (the fact that a train was passing by at the time of the crime calls the two witnesses' testimonies into doubt).
Having argued several points and gotten no favourable response from other jurors, he reluctantly agrees that all he seems to be accomplishing is hanging the jury. He takes a bold gamble: he requests another vote, this time by secret ballot. He proposes that he