Accumulative Sentence

A sentence—a court's formal pronouncement of the legal consequences of a person's conviction of a crime—additional to others, imposed on a defendant who has been convicted upon an indictment containing several counts, each charging a distinct offense, or who is under conviction at the same time for several distinct offenses; each sentence is to run consecutively, beginning at the expiration of the previous sentence.

A person must finish one sentence before being allowed to start the next one. Another name for accumulative sentence is cumulative or consecutive sentence.

The opposite of an accumulative sentence is a concurrent sentence—two or more prison sentences that are to be served simultaneously, so that the prisoner is entitled to be released at the end of the longest sentence.