Every person convicted in this state of a felony who shall have been convicted twice previously of any felony or federal crime upon charges separately brought and arising out of separate incidents at different times and who shall have been sentenced to separate terms of one (1) year or more in any state and/or federal penal institution, whether in this state or elsewhere, shall be sentenced to the maximum term of imprisonment prescribed for such felony unless the court provides an explanation in its sentencing order setting forth the cause for deviating from the maximum sentence, and such sentence shall not be reduced or suspended nor shall such person be eligible for parole or probation.
Miss. Code Ann. § 99-19-81
Sentencing of habitual criminals to maximum term of imprisonment
Applied in 330 court decisions — leading case McClain v. State (1993)
Most recently applied in Allan David Cooper v. State of Mississippi (December 2018)
Laws, 1976, ch. 470, § 1; brought forward without change, Laws, 2014, ch. 457, § 79, eff from and after July 1, 2014; Laws, 2018, ch. 416, § 12, eff from and after July 1, 2018.
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.