Massachusetts Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog

Massachusetts criminal defendants may face more severe degrees of sentencing if jurors continue to struggle with reckless, knowing conduct. According to an article in Lawyers USA, a recent study Sorting Guilty Minds found that jurors had difficulty in distinguishing between "knowing conduct" and "reckless conduct." Participants were asked to evaluate hypothetical situations with varying levels of defendant culpability and harm to victims before deciding on a level of punishment. The subjects identified knowing conduct 50% of the time and reckless conduct only 40%.

If jurors continue to have this difficulty in understanding the distinctions, there could be very serious sentencing consequences for criminal defendants, especially in homicide cases. For example, in Massachusetts a "reckless" homicide sentence could range from a 2 to 6 year non-mandatory prison. A "knowing" homicide could yield a 16 to 48 year mandatory imprisonment. These sentencing ranging jumps would have an enormous legal significance for defendants according to the study in the New York University Law Review . The Model Penal Code typically requires that jurors infer the mental state of a criminal defendant at the time the crime was committed, since punishable guilt requires that bad thoughts accompany bad acts.

Massachusetts jurors must sort the defendants mental state into one of four specific categories- purposeful,knowing,reckless,or negligent. The category the jurors determine defines both the nature of the crime and degree of punishment. Therefore it is crucial that the jurors understand the distinction among the four. The Model Penal Code assumes that ordinary people can do this with a high degree of accuracy when properly instructed. However, this recent study of 1,326 participants yielded results that state otherwise. In many instances, the subjects reversed the MPC hierarchy and punished reckless behaviors more than they punished the knowing ones.