§ 25-10,104.Judgment for defendant; irregularity in process or jurisdictional defect; restoration of status quo.

This section has two distinct parts. The first fills in what a defendant’s judgment under §§ 25-10,102 and 25-10,103 looks like: an order for the return of the property, or its value if a return cannot happen, or the value of possession, along with damages for the time the property was wrongfully withheld and costs of suit. It converts the jury’s earlier findings into a concrete remedy.

The second part addresses a different problem entirely — cases where a trial on the merits never happens because something went wrong with the process itself, or because the court lacked jurisdiction. In that situation, on a proper showing, the court can restore the parties to status quo by ordering the replevied property returned. This is not a ruling on who owns the property; it is a reset, undoing what the flawed proceeding accomplished.

Notably, a defendant seeking that reset does not have to submit personally to the court’s jurisdiction to ask for it. That protects a defendant challenging jurisdiction from having to concede the very jurisdiction being challenged just to get the property back.