MA · jury_instructions
Instruction 2.250, Criminal Model Jury Instructions for Use in the District Court
Motive
MOTIVE
The Commonwealth is not required to prove motive as an element
of the offense. However, you may consider an absence of motive
evidence in determining whether the Commonwealth has proved all the
elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.
Commonwealth v. Brea, 488 Mass. 150, 166-67 (2021) (declining to spell out the exact
circumstances in which a defendant may be entitled to an instruction that the absence of
motive can be considered, or what precisely a proper instruction should say, but holding
that, when “the Commonwealth requests an instruction informing the jury that it is not
required to prove motive as part of its case, the judge should also inform the jury of the
corollary principle: that the jury can consider an absence of motive evidence in
determining whether the Commonwealth has proved all the elements of the crime
beyond a reasonable doubt.”).
History
Instruction 2.250, Criminal Model Jury Instructions for Use in the District Court (Issued June 2022). Published by the Administrative Office of the District Court, District Court Department of the Trial Court, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, on www.mass.gov. © 1988-2009 Administrative Office of the District Court; reproduced under its title-page permission ("You may freely reproduce or copy this work if you identify its source and any changes made to the original work"). Source: https://www.mass.gov/doc/2250-motive/download. Changes made: the text is extracted from the published PDF (verified by three extraction engines); the running headers, page numbers and line layout are removed, and a closing NOTES section, where printed, is carried as the note.
Provenance
- Source
- mass.gov
- Retrieved
- 2026-09-25
- Edition
- 2026-09-25
- Content hash
5d82ee7f9aa19229a35e7391c97afe14b0d115f89f3a6b70ffb0aad95da8e8e2
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