Susan Glaspell's play Trifles and Reginald Rose's Twelve Angry Men make a compelling statement about justice in the American legal system: justice is completely dependent upon human beings, and human beings are fallible. The central conflict in each play is the determination of guilt in a murder among people that do not agree on what happened or how it happened, and this is the most compelling dramatic convention in both.
In Trifles, the determination of guilt is carried on by two separate groups-the men, who think they are far superior to the women in terms of their analytical ability-and the women, who with their attention to detail actually figure out what happened and who committed the crime. The central conflict surrounding who killed Mr. Wright hinges on the fact that the usual evidence that the men are looking at does not tell the story of what occurred. There is a conflict between assumption and evidence, and the men do not find the evidence. The women, looking through Mrs. Wright's sewing things, find an empty cage with the cage door ripped off by violent force and a dead bird with a broken neck wrapped up in a cloth inside her sewing box. They recognize that Mr. Wright was not a kind or cheerful person and realize that it must have been he who wrung the bird's neck. In Mrs. Wright's world, with no other pleasant company except the bird, this was a tragedy of huge proportions, and the women figure out that she killed her husband because he killed the bird. As Mrs. Hale puts it, "His neck, Choked the life out of him" (Glaspell). Mrs. Wright had accordingly done the same thing to her husband that he had done to her bird-hanged him to break his neck and choke the life out of him. The women conceal what they know, leaving the sheriff and his men unable to establish a motive for the crime. Although the men are arrogant and think their efforts are superior to those of the w
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