Any person, otherwise competent, who will make oath that he is impartial in the case, shall be competent as a juror in any criminal case, notwithstanding the fact that he has an impression or an opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the accused, if it appear to the satisfaction of the court that he has no bias or feeling or prejudice in the case, and no desire to reach any result in it, except that to which the evidence may conduct. Any juror shall be excluded, however, if the court be of opinion that he cannot try the case impartially, and the exclusion shall not be assignable for error.
Miss. Code Ann. § 13-5-79
When opinion as to guilt or innocence will not render one incompetent in a criminal case
Applied in 19 court decisions — leading case 592 So. 2d 114 - Hansen v. State (1991)
Most recently applied in Joseph Patton v. State of Mississippi (February 2018)
Codes, 1880, § 3072; 1892, § 2355; 1906, § 2685; Hemingway’s 1917, § 2177; 1930, § 2030; 1942, § 1763.
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.