Miss. Code Ann. § 97-3-21

Homicide; penalty for first- or second-degree murder or capital murder

Applied in 97 court decisions — leading case Lockett v. Ohio (1978)

Most recently applied in Adrian Montgomery v. State of Mississippi (September 2018)

Codes, Hutchinson’s 1848, ch. 64, art. 12, Title 2 (1); 1857, ch. 64, art. 167; 1871, § 2630; 1880, § 2877; 1892, § 1151; 1906, § 1229; Hemingway’s 1917, § 959, 1930, § 987; 194…

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citing decisions per year

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.

(1) Every person who shall be convicted of first-degree murder shall be sentenced by the court to imprisonment for life in the custody of the Department of Corrections.

(2) Every person who shall be convicted of second-degree murder shall be imprisoned for life in the custody of the Department of Corrections if the punishment is so fixed by the jury in its verdict after a separate sentencing proceeding. If the jury fails to agree on fixing the penalty at imprisonment for life, the court shall fix the penalty at not less than twenty (20) nor more than forty (40) years in the custody of the Department of Corrections.

(3) Every person who shall be convicted of capital murder shall be sentenced (a) to death; (b) to imprisonment for life in the State Penitentiary without parole; or (c) to imprisonment for life in the State Penitentiary with eligibility for parole as provided in Section 47-7-3(1) (f).

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.