Pasco v. Harley

Citations

• 73 Fla. 819
• 75 So. 30

Syllabus

<p>1. Organic and statutory provisions relating to homestead exemptions should be liberally construed in the interest of the family home. But the law should not be so applied as to make it an instrument of fraud or imposition upon creditors.</p> <p>2. The provisions of the homestead laws should be carried out in the liberal and beneficent spirit in which they were enacted, but at the same time great care should be taken to prevent them from becoming the instruments of fraud.</p> <p>3. An execution issued on a judgment, called a writ of fieri facias, is a lien upon the personal property of the defendant in execution from the time such writ shall be delivered to the sheriff, '</p> <p>4. A statutory lien is as binding as a mortgage and has the same capacity to hold land, so long as the statute preserves its force.</p> <p>5. The right conferred by the Homestead Article of the State Constitution is to “exemptions” of the stated property from forced sales and from liens, and the right may accrue after the property is acquired, by the owner becoming “the head of a family residing in this State.” „»</p> <p>6. Where judgment and execution liens upon a debtor’s property are obtained by a creditor in enforcing payment of the debtor’s promissory notes at a time when the debtor was not the head of a family and consequently not entitled to homestead exemptions, the debtor upon subsequently becoming the head of a family by marriage, is not entitled to homestead exemptions in the property on which the statutory judgment and execution liens already exist, to the exclusion of the pre-existing liens.</p> <p>7. The Constitution forbids judgment and execution liens only on “exempted property,” and the property of a person who is not the head of a family is not “exempted property” under the Constitution. ,</p> <p>8. The mgre change of the status of the owner of the property to that of “the head of a family,” does not destroy then existing judgment and execution liens of a bona fide credi