Any parent who shall desert or wilfully neglect or refuse to provide for the support and maintenance of his or her child or children, including the natural parent of an illegitimate child or children wherein paternity has been established by law or when the natural parent has acknowledged paternity in writing, while said child or children are under the age of eighteen (18) years shall be guilty of a felony and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished for a first offense by a fine of not less than One Hundred Dollars ($100.00) nor more than Five Hundred Dollars ($500.00), or by commitment to the custody of the Department of Corrections not more than five (5) years, or both; and for a second or subsequent offense, by a fine of not less than One Thousand Dollars ($1,000.00) nor more than Ten Thousand Dollars ($10,000.00), or by commitment to the custody of the Department of Corrections not less than two (2) years nor more than five (5) years, or both, in the discretion of the court.
Miss. Code Ann. § 97-5-3
Desertion or nonsupport of child under age eighteen
Applied in 5 court decisions — leading case Rakestraw v. Rakestraw (1998)
Most recently applied in Rakestraw v. Rakestraw (April 1998)
Codes, 1930, § 861; 1942, § 2087; Laws, 1928, Ex. ch. 89; Laws, 1962, ch. 311; Laws, 1995, ch. 533, § 1, eff from and after July 1, 1995.
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.