Miss. Code Ann. § 97-3-25

Homicide; killing of child under 18 years of age by perpetrator over 21 years of age; penalties for manslaughter and child homicide

Applied in 36 court decisions — leading case 671 So. 2d 581 - Walker v. State (1995)

Most recently applied in Jonathan Earl Herrington v. State of Mississippi (October 2017)

Codes, Hutchinson’s 1848, ch. 64, art. 12, Title 3 (20, 21); 1857, ch. 64, art. 183; 1871, § 2646; 1880, § 2894; 1892, § 1167; 1906, § 1245; Hemingway’s 1917, § 975; 1930, § 100…

How often courts cite this section

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) Except as otherwise provided in this section, any person convicted of manslaughter shall be fined in a sum not less than Five Hundred Dollars ($500.00), or imprisoned in the county jail not more than one (1) year, or both, or in the custody of the Department of Corrections not less than two (2) years, nor more than twenty (20) years.

(2) A person is guilty of child homicide if: The person is found guilty of manslaughter in circumstances where the killing, although without malice, was intentional and not accidental; and

(3) The perpetrator was over the age of twenty-one (21) years and the victim was a child under the age of eighteen (18) years.

(4) A person found guilty of child homicide shall be imprisoned in the custody of the Department of Corrections for a term not to exceed thirty (30) years.

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.