If any man and woman shall unlawfully cohabit, whether in adultery or fornication, they shall be fined in any sum not more than five hundred dollars each, and imprisoned in the county jail not more than six months; and it shall not be necessary, to constitute the offense, that the parties shall dwell together publicly as husband and wife, but it may be proved by circumstances which show habitual sexual intercourse.
Miss. Code Ann. § 97-29-1
Adultery and fornication; unlawful cohabitation
Applied in 18 court decisions — leading case Owens v. State (1999)
Most recently applied in United States v. Luis Moreira Bravo (December 2022)
Codes, Hutchinson’s 1848, ch. 64, art. 1(58); 1857, ch. 64, art. 8; 1871, § 2486; 1880, § 2700; 1892, § 953; 1906, § 1029; Hemingway’s 1917, § 754; 1930, § 772; 1942, § 1998.
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.