§ 9-13-172.When execution sale set aside

The officer who conducts an execution sale — typically the sheriff — acts under the supervising court’s authority rather than independently, and this section states that supervisory relationship directly: courts have full power over their officers making execution sales.

Once the court is satisfied that a sale is infected with fraud, irregularity, or error to the injury of either party, setting the sale aside is not left to the court’s discretion — the statute says the court “shall” do it. The three grounds are distinct (fraud, irregularity, and error each describe a different kind of problem), but all three share the same limiting condition: the defect has to have injured one of the parties, not merely amounted to a technical slip that hurt no one.

This section works alongside several others that map out when a flawed sale stands and when it falls. Code Section 9-13-172.1 supplies its own rescission-and-damages framework for a narrower category of sales the seller itself chooses to rescind before delivering the deed. Code Section 9-13-171 addresses when a defendant’s own silence at the sale can bind him despite a defect in the underlying process. And Code Section 9-13-168 keeps an innocent purchaser’s own diligence duty narrow, so that irregularities of the kind this section addresses remain a matter between the officer and the parties, not grounds to unwind the sale against a purchaser who did nothing wrong.