All objections to an indictment for a defect appearing on the face thereof, shall be taken by demurrer to the indictment, and not otherwise, before the issuance of the venire facias in capital cases, and before the jury shall be impaneled in all other cases, and not afterward. The court for any formal defect, may, if it be thought necessary, cause the indictment to be forthwith amended, and thereupon the trial shall proceed as if such defect had not appeared.
Miss. Code Ann. § 99-7-21
Demurrers; when filed; amendment of indictment
Applied in 19 court decisions — leading case Gray v. State (1998)
Most recently applied in Artea Chilton v. State of Mississippi (October 2017)
Codes, 1857, ch. 64, art. 268; 1871, § 2805; 1880, § 3012; 1892, § 1354; 1906, § 1426; Hemingway’s 1917, § 1182; 1930, § 1206; 1942, § 2449.
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.