If the father or mother of any child under the age of six years, or any other person having the lawful custody of such child, or to whom such child shall have been confided, shall expose such child in any highway, street, field, house, outhouse, or elsewhere, with intent wholly to abandon it, such person shall, upon conviction, be punished by imprisonment in the penitentiary not more than seven years, or in the county jail not more than one year.
Miss. Code Ann. § 97-5-1
Abandonment of child under age six
Applied in 3 court decisions — leading case In re the Adoption of a Minor Child (2006)
Most recently applied in Brown v. State (December 2012)
Codes, Hutchinson’s 1848, ch. 64, art. 12, Title 3 (32); 1857, ch. 64, art. 57; 1871, § 2528; 1880, § 2752; 1892, § 1001; 1906, § 1078; Hemingway’s 1917, § 805; 1930, § 824; 194…
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.