The terms “capital case,” “capital cases,” “capital offense,” “capital offenses,” and “capital crime” when used in any statute shall denote criminal cases, offenses and crimes punishable by death or imprisonment for life in the state penitentiary. The term “capital murder” when used in any statute shall denote criminal cases, offenses and crimes punishable by death, or imprisonment for life in the state penitentiary.
Miss. Code Ann. § 1-3-4
Capital case, capital offense, capital crime, and capital murder
Applied in 20 court decisions — leading case Havard v. State (2006)
Most recently applied in Higginbotham v. State (September 2012)
Laws, 1974, ch. 576, § 1; Laws, 1977, ch. 458, § 6, eff from and after passage (approved April 13, 1977
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Current official text: Mississippi Code (LexisNexis). Digitized from the UniCourt Code Improvement Commission public-domain capture. Reproduced from public-domain Mississippi statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.