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Colorado Model Jury Instructions
Although this course is designed to give you an overview of how criminal law works in the United States, we will often use Colorado law as an illustrative example. Below are the model jury instructions for some familiar (and unfamiliar) crimes. The idea is to give you some familiarity with how crimes are explained to lay juries; later in the semester we will go into far greater depth on a number of these crimes as well as others. For now, the point is not to master (or even memorize) the elements of these offenses, but rather to get used to reading statutes and understanding what they do (and do not) prohibit.
This book, and all H2O books, are Creative Commons licensed for sharing and re-use with the exception of certain excerpts. Any excerpts from the Restatements of the Law, Principles of the Law, and the Model Penal Code are copyright by The American Law Institute. Excerpts are reproduced with permission, not as part of a Creative Commons license.