Art. 5127.Release Bond

A release bond, sometimes called a forthcoming bond, lets a party get seized property back into circulation by substituting security in its place. Rather than leaving property tied up under seizure while a case proceeds, the party entitled to it posts a bond, and the sheriff releases the property, with the bond standing in the property's place as security for whoever the seizure protected.

Article 5127 controls who can stand behind that bond. Property seized under any order, judgment, writ, mandate, or process of a court may be released under a release or forthcoming bond only if the bond is executed by a surety company licensed to do business in Louisiana, or by an individual surety the sheriff has approved after personally becoming satisfied of that surety's solvency. The sheriff's own approval role here is distinctive: unlike the general bond rules in this Chapter, which route solvency questions through the court, Article 5127 puts the sheriff in the position of vetting an individual surety before ever releasing the property.

The rest of this Chapter still applies. Article 5127 pulls in Articles 5121 through 5126 wholesale, so a release bond has to be made payable to the clerk, comes with the same affidavit and solvency-testing procedures, and gets the same opportunity to be corrected if it is later found insufficient or invalid. This site has already seen the release-bond concept surface in narrower form, in the context of attachment and sequestration, where a defendant uses this same device to free seized property while the underlying dispute proceeds. Article 5127 is where that device's general rule lives.