Query posts by category not working

I have a query to pull all posts of a certain category. It used to work great but all of a suddenly stopped working. The only thing that has changed that I know of is the server has a newer version of php which I have no idea if that would break this. Here is what I had been using.

<?php query_posts(array('orderby' => 'DESC', 'cat' => 12,'showposts' => 12));

If I remove the ‘cat’ => 12 part I do get all posts. I assume my query is wrong but it is weird it used to work.

I also tried these.

<?php query_posts( 'category_name = sample' );

<?php query_posts( 'cat=12' ); ?>

Here is the whole code snippet.

<?php query_posts(array('orderby' => 'DESC', 'cat' => 12,'showposts' => 12));

if (have_posts()) :
while (have_posts()) : the_post();
?>
		<div class="second-sb-image">
			<a title="<?php the_title(); ?>" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>">
		<?php echo get_the_post_thumbnail( $post_id, $size, $attr ); ?>
			<div class="second-sb-text">
			<h3><?php the_title(); ?></h3>
			</div>
			</a>
		</div>

<?php
endwhile;
endif;
?>

Any ideas or can someone point me in the right direction?