The Massachusetts Criminal Court Process

Since March 2025, most discovery is automatic, with no motion required. The prosecutor must turn over what he has at arraignment and the rest by the first pretrial conference, and the obligation runs to the whole prosecution team: the police who investigated, forensic analysts and crime lab personnel, victim witness advocates, and any joint task force involved. He has a duty to ask them what they have, not simply hand over his own file.

That covers your own statements, witness names and statements, police interview notes, photographs and video and audio recordings, police reports, test and examination results, and a summary of any identification procedure. It also covers anything favorable to you, whether or not the prosecutor thinks it credible or admissible and whether or not anyone wrote it down. That includes inducements offered to a witness, a witness's record or pending cases, inconsistent or recanted statements, bias, information in a law enforcement misconduct database, a witness who failed to identify you, evidence pointing at someone else, and failures to follow protocol in the investigation itself.

That is what the rules require. It is not a description of what always arrives. In practice we frequently have to file motions to compel discovery, and to ask for things the automatic obligation does not reach. Some material is not in the government's hands at all, such as records held by a hospital, a school, a phone carrier, or a private business. Reaching those takes a summons, which can command a person to produce documents or objects, subject to the court quashing it if compliance would be unreasonable or if it is being used to get around the ordinary discovery rules. Assuming everything has been handed over because a rule says it should be is not a defense strategy.

A pretrial motion is written, signed, states its grounds in numbered paragraphs, and carries an affidavit from someone with personal knowledge of the facts. Grounds you do not raise are generally treated as waived. A motion to suppress and a motion to dismiss each require a memorandum of law. Only motions the two sides could not agree on at the pretrial conference get filed at all.

More about motions to suppress statements in Massachusetts

Discovery motions come before the pretrial hearing ends. Other motions come before a trial date is assigned or within 21 days after. Both sides have a right to be heard on them.

Most cases end before this point. But whether yours does is not something the prosecutor decides, and it is not something we decide either. You do.

More about what happens at a Massachusetts criminal trial

In the District Court a jury is six people. Your case is tried to a jury unless you file a written waiver and ask to be tried by the judge alone. That choice is yours to make, after talking it through with your lawyer.

Two things have to happen for a waiver to count, and missing either one makes it ineffective. The judge has to talk with you on the record and be satisfied that you understand what you are giving up and are choosing it freely. And you have to sign a written waiver that gets filed with the court. You also have to be represented by a lawyer, or have formally waived that right, before a waiver will be accepted at all.

You cannot be asked to make this decision early. The law says no waiver may be received until the pretrial conference is finished, the court has heard where things stand, and any discovery motions have been decided and complied with. That is why the court date where this comes up is called the compliance and election date. The point is that you should not have to choose before you know what the evidence is.

The judge can decline to approve a waiver, but has to give a good and sufficient reason in open court and on the record. If there is more than one defendant on the case, everyone has to waive, unless the judge separates the cases.

The Commonwealth has to prove every element of every charge beyond a reasonable doubt, and a jury verdict has to be unanimous. You do not have to prove anything, and you do not have to testify.

When the Commonwealth finishes putting in its evidence, your lawyer can ask the judge for a required finding of not guilty. This asks the judge to decide whether the evidence, taken at its best for the Commonwealth, is enough as a matter of law to convict. If it is not, the judge enters a finding of not guilty and the case is over right there. The judge has to rule on that motion when it is made, and if it is denied you can still put on a defense without having given anything up.

The motion can be made again at the close of all the evidence, and at that stage the judge may hold off deciding and let the jury deliberate first. Even after a guilty verdict, the judge can set the verdict aside, order a new trial, enter a finding of not guilty, or enter a finding on a lesser offense included in the charge. The motion can also be renewed within five days after the jury is discharged.

For the crimes within its jurisdiction, a District Court judge can impose the same penalties a Superior Court judge could, with one exception that matters: the District Court cannot sentence you to state prison. That limit holds whether your case was tried to a jury or to the judge.

If you are placed on probation, you are supervised by the probation department of the court where the case started, unless the judge orders otherwise.

More about what to expect at a sentencing hearing

Getting the case resolved and clearing your record are two different things, and the second one does not always happen on its own.

If you are found not guilty, or the grand jury returns no bill, or the court finds no probable cause, the Commissioner of Probation seals the appearance and the disposition on his own, and the clerk and probation officers seal their files too. You do not have to ask. You can ask in writing that they not do it, but that is unusual.

Two practical things follow, and clerks often say the first one out loud in the courtroom. You have ten days to tell the Commissioner of Probation in writing if you do not want the record sealed. Most people want it sealed and do nothing, which is all it takes. The second thing nobody tells you: once the file is sealed, getting a copy back out is difficult. If there is any chance you will need to show what actually happened, whether to a licensing board, an employer who already knows about the charge, an immigration lawyer, or a school, ask the clerk for a certified copy of the docket before you leave the courthouse. It costs very little, and it is far easier to keep a copy than to go back for one.

A dismissal is different, and this surprises people. Where the case ended in a nolle prosequi or a dismissal, sealing is not automatic. The court has to find that substantial justice would best be served, and only then directs the clerk to seal. So a case that was dismissed can sit on your record until someone asks a judge to seal it.

For everything else, you petition the Commissioner of Probation. The waiting period is three years for a misdemeanor and seven for a felony, counted from the disposition and including any time in custody, and you cannot have been found guilty of a new offense inside that window. Sex offenses wait fifteen years or as long as you have a duty to register, whichever is longer, and anyone ever classified level 2 or level 3 is not eligible at all. Most firearms offenses, and convictions for crimes against public justice such as bribery and corruption, cannot be sealed this way, with resisting arrest the exception.

Once a record is sealed, the Commissioner of Probation answers that no record exists, and you may answer "no record" yourself on an application for a job, housing, or a professional license. A sealed record cannot disqualify you from public employment. But three requesters are carved out of that answer: a law enforcement agency, a court, and an appointing authority. Each of those can still be told.

That carve-out for courts matters more than most people expect. The report a judge has in front of them is not the CORI an employer sees. It is a broader record kept by the Probation Department, and a sealed case can still show up on it, marked as sealed. For a conviction sealed after a waiting period, sealing changes what the outside world sees. It does not change what a judge sees.

An acquittal is treated differently, and better. Where the case ended in a not guilty finding, a no bill, or a finding of no probable cause, the sealed record is not made available to the court, even if you are convicted of something years later. That is the strongest protection in the sealing statutes, and it is worth knowing you have it.

Sealing is still not erasure. The record exists, a sealed conviction can be considered when a judge imposes sentence in a later case, and in certain custody, visitation, and abuse proceedings a party can ask a judge to look at a sealed record.

Probation comes with written conditions. If your probation officer believes you have broken one, the Probation Department serves you with a Notice of Probation Violation and Hearing. The notice has to say exactly what you are accused of, and it has to give you a date. In the District Court you are entitled to at least seven days before the hearing unless you waive that, and the hearing should not be set more than thirty days out.

A new criminal charge starts this automatically. When a complaint issues against someone on probation, the Probation Department is required to begin violation proceedings, and the violation hearing does not wait for the new case. Courts are expressly barred from postponing a violation hearing to see how the criminal charge turns out. This is one of the hardest things to explain to someone living through it: you can be found in violation based on conduct you are later acquitted of, because the two proceedings use different standards of proof.

If probation asks that you be held while the violation is pending, that is a separate and earlier hearing, called a probation detention hearing. The only two questions there are whether there is probable cause to believe you violated, and whether you should be held. Bail as you know it from a new charge does not apply. The judge weighs your record, the offense you are on probation for, any new charges, whether you will come back, and how likely incarceration is if a violation is found.

The violation hearing itself has two distinct parts. First the judge decides whether the violation happened. The standard is a preponderance of the evidence, not beyond a reasonable doubt, and hearsay is allowed. A police report or a letter from a program can carry the day on its own, though the judge has to find in writing that it is substantially reliable before relying on it. Only after a violation is found does the judge turn to what to do about it, and both sides are heard separately on that.

A finding of violation does not mean you go to jail. The judge has four options and only four: continue probation with a warning, end probation, change the conditions including how long probation runs, or revoke it. If probation is revoked, a sentence that had been suspended is ordered executed.

If your case was continued without a finding, the options are different again. The judge can dismiss the case outright, continue the continuance as it stands, continue it with new conditions, or end it and enter a guilty finding. You have the right to a lawyer at both the detention hearing and the violation hearing, including an appointed lawyer if you cannot afford one.

More about Massachusetts probation violation hearings

If you were convicted after a trial, the notice of appeal has to be filed within thirty days of sentencing. That deadline is short, and it is the one people miss. An appeal is not a second trial. The appellate court reads the record and decides whether something went legally wrong, not whether it would have reached the same verdict.

There is a second door, and it works differently. Within sixty days you can ask the judge who sentenced you to revise or revoke the sentence. This goes back to the same judge and asks that judge to reconsider on reflection. The sixty days cannot be extended by anyone, and the judge can weigh only facts that existed at sentencing, not how well you have done since.

More about appealing a Massachusetts criminal conviction

A motion for a new trial can be filed at any time, if it appears that justice may not have been done. This is the route for the things that were not visible at the time: a lawyer who did not do the job, evidence that surfaced later, a plea that was not made knowingly, a warning about immigration consequences that should have been given. Separately, if you are serving a sentence that was imposed in violation of law, that can be challenged at any point.

One thing to know before filing anything. Grounds you do not raise are generally treated as waived. You do not get to bring one issue now and another one later, and a motion filed after your direct appeal has already been decided faces a much harder standard than one filed before.

If you are weighing any of this, the timing matters more than almost anything else. It is worth a call before a deadline runs rather than after.