Whenever, on the trial of an indictment for any offense, there shall appear to be any variance between the statement in the indictment and the evidence offered in proof thereof, in the name of any county, city, town, village, division, or any other place mentioned in such indictment, or in the name or description of any person or body politic or corporate, therein stated or alleged to be the owner of any property, real or personal, which shall form the subject of any offense charged therein, or in the name or description of any person, body politic or corporate, therein stated or alleged to be injured or damaged; or intended to be injured or damaged, by the commission of such offense, or in the Christian name or surname, or both, or other description whatever, of any person whomsoever, therein named or described, or in the ownership of any property named or described therein, or in the description of any property or thing, it shall and may be lawful for the court before which the trial shall be had, if it shall consider such variance not material to the merits of the case, and that the defendant cannot be prejudiced thereby in his defense on the merits, to order such indictment and the record and proceedings in the court to be amended according to the proof, whenever it may be deemed necessary by the court to amend such indictment, record, and proceedings, on such terms as to postponing the trial, to be had before the same or another jury, as the court shall think reasonable. After such amendment, the trial shall proceed in the same manner, and with the same consequences in all respects, as if a variance had not occurred; but if the court shall, on application, refuse a continuance, the defendant may take a bill of exceptions thereto, and assign such refusal for error.
Miss. Code Ann. § 99-17-13
Variance between indictment and proof; amendment of record and indictment; continuance
Applied in 27 court decisions — leading case Evans v. State (1997)
Most recently applied in 199 So. 3d 1265 - Justine Lynn Nations v. State of Mississippi (August 2016)
Codes, 1871, § 2799; 1880, § 3081; 1892, § 1435; 1906, § 1508; Hemingway’s 1917, § 1266; 1930, § 1289; 1942, § 2532.
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.