Art. 5186.Account and Payment of Costs

The poverty privilege defers costs; it does not erase them. Article 5186 sets up the bookkeeping and recovery mechanism that runs alongside the privilege. Paragraph A requires the public officers to whom costs would ordinarily be payable, the clerk of court, sheriff, and others, to keep a running account of all the costs a privileged litigant incurs over the course of the case, so the amount owed is never in doubt whenever it eventually comes due.

Paragraph B addresses succession proceedings specifically. Where a party has been permitted to proceed without paying costs in a succession, the court orders those accumulated costs paid out of the succession's own assets, recognizing that a succession has a distinct fund available to cover its own administrative costs regardless of any individual party's poverty.

Paragraph C covers the more common case: an ordinary civil proceeding that ends in judgment for the indigent party. When the indigent litigant wins, the losing party is condemned to pay all costs due to a public officer, and that officer's claim is given a privilege on the judgment that ranks ahead of the indigent party's own claim or their attorney's. If instead judgment goes the other way and the indigent party is condemned to pay costs, the officer to whom those costs are due can record an affidavit of the account in the mortgage records, and that recorded affidavit carries the same effect as a judgment for the amount due, letting the officer enforce collection without a separate lawsuit.