§ 9-13-52.When sheriff may levy on and sell land outside county

A sheriff's authority to sell land under execution stops at the county line. The general rule in this section is a prohibition: a sheriff or other levying officer may not sell land outside the county where he holds office, no matter how convenient it might be to combine a sale with property the defendant owns elsewhere.

The exception covers a specific and recurring problem — a single tract of land that straddles a county boundary, where that boundary happens to be the line of the defendant's own residence county. When that happens, the land may be sold in the county where the defendant lives, even though part of the tract physically sits across the line. The portion of that same tract lying in the other county gets its own rule: it may be levied on and sold in either county, giving the levying officer a choice rather than locking the sale to one location.

The statute does not extend this flexibility to land that happens to sit in a county other than where the sheriff serves, absent that residence-line connection. Outside the boundary-splitting scenario the section describes, the basic rule holds: a sheriff sells land in his own county, not someone else's.