MS · jury_instructions
Proposed Mississippi Plain Language Model Jury Instructions - Civil 5040
Damages - Purpose of Punitive Damages
You are to decide whether to award punitive damages to the plaintiff, and if so, in what
amount. If you decide to award punitive damages, then you should remember that punitive
damages are designed to punish the defendant and to warn the defendant and others not to act in
the same or similar way as the defendant.
You may consider the following factors in determining the amount of punitive damages
to award the plaintiff:
1. The defendant’s financial condition and net worth;
2. The defendant’s conduct and how badly it affected the plaintiff;
3. Whether the defendant knew that the conduct was causing harm and what motives [he/she/it]
had;
4. How long the defendant’s conduct lasted and whether [he/she/it] tried to cover up the conduct;
and
5. Any other evidence which relates to the defendant’s conduct.
History
Proposed Mississippi Plain Language Model Jury Instructions - Civil 5040 (current as of February 17, 2012). Submitted in 2012 by the Mississippi Model Jury Instructions Commission (created by the Supreme Court of Mississippi by order of December 30, 2008) and published by the Court on courts.ms.gov. The Court states that these model jury instructions have not been adopted or approved by the Supreme Court of Mississippi.
Provenance
- Source
- courts.ms.gov
- Retrieved
- 2026-09-25
- Edition
- 2026-09-25
- Content hash
3f7bb0a0c1c361186b5636018a13e46115510c2733f611fe2c5fb7845d93fd3b
The link goes to the issuing authority’s own document — the one we read to produce this record. Where a source publishes whole titles rather than sections, your browser may need a moment to jump to the provision.
Unofficial copy of government-published law, reproduced from official sources with full provenance. Not an official publication; verify against official sources before relying on it in a filing. Records in the 'guidance' corpus, and only that corpus, are sub-regulatory (interpretive guidelines, survey procedures) and are not binding law. Validity bounds follow each jurisdiction's declared temporalBasis.