§ 9-13-128.Damages for delay; procedure following dismissal or withdrawal of illegality

This section pairs a deterrent with a cleanup procedure. The deterrent comes first: on the trial of an issue formed on an affidavit of illegality, the jury has the power to assess damages, up to 25 percent of the principal debt, if it appears the illegality was filed only to delay the execution rather than on any genuine legal or factual basis. The cap sets an outer limit; within it, the amount is left to what the jury finds reasonable and just, and only once delay-only motive has been shown.

The second half of the section handles what happens when an illegality does not survive to a full trial on the merits — when it is dismissed for insufficiency or informality, meaning some defect in the affidavit itself, or when the defendant withdraws it outright. In either case, the plaintiff in execution is not left to guess at next steps. The plaintiff may proceed exactly as the law provides for cases where a claim is dismissed or withdrawn, borrowing the procedure Georgia already built for that parallel remedy elsewhere in this chapter.

The cross-reference is a deliberate piece of drafting, not an oversight. Claims and affidavits of illegality are Chapter 13’s two main levy-stage defenses, and rather than write a separate dismissal-and-withdrawal procedure for each, the statute lets illegality borrow the one already built for claims.