Court Opinion

ID: 9646762
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 13:10:11.882681+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:05:33.256655
License: Public Domain

OPINION ON MOTION FOR REHEARING
The Appellant in his Motion for Rehearing, which contains no points “distinctly specified” as required by Tex.R.App.P. 100(a) argues that our “opinion is tantamount to judicial legislation.”
We did not conceive nor pass the turnover statute. The legislature has known for more than fifty years that it has been the law of this state that the “current wages” exemption did not apply to funds once they had been paid to a wage earner. For at least ten years military retirement pay has been classified by the courts of this state as “property” and not as current wages. The legislature knows how to provide a period for protection even after funds are paid.
In Sutherland v. Young, 292 S.W. 581 (Tex.Civ.App. — Waco 1927, no writ), the court analyzed the lack of protection for wages after they are paid as compared to proceeds from the sale of a homestead and said:
Our Constitution and laws exempt to the head of each family the homestead, and our Supreme Court held that, immediately upon the homestead being sold and converted into cash, the funds derived therefrom lost their exemption and became subject to the payment of debts due by the head of the family. Mann v. Kelsey, 71 Tex. 609, 12 S.W. 43, 10 Am. *865St.Rep. 800; Kirby v. Giddings, 75 Tex. 679, 13 S.W. 27. In order to enable a person to sell his home and invest in another, the Legislature, in 1897, passed a statute which exempted the proceeds of a voluntary sale of the homestead for six months. Article 3834, Revised Statutes 1925. If the Legislature desires to exempt the wages after same have been collected and put under the control of the wageeamer [sic] for a definite length of time, as it did the proceeds from the voluntary sale of the homestead, it can do so. It is, however, the duty of the courts to construe the law, and it is not their prerogative to enact legislation.
If the legislature believes that former wives should not collect the amounts their former husbands have agreed to pay to them, it may provide protection to those husbands; but until it does so, we will apply the provisions of the turnover statute as enacted. That is not “judicial legislation.” For the same holding, see Barlow v. Lane, 745 S.W.2d 451 (Tex.App.—Waco 1988).
Basically the exemption statutes, such as applied to teacher retirement pay, were enacted to provide that an employee may build up a fund from which to draw benefits after a given period of employment or the attainment of a given age, and to provide that since those funds are not subject to disposition by the employee until retirement, they should not be subject to the disposition of the employee’s creditors. That exemption is not a lifelong exemption from one’s debts. Once the funds are paid to the employee, the funds become “fair game” for the creditor and the turnover statute only provides a procedure whereby a creditor gets a “shot” at that “game.”
The Motion for Rehearing is overruled.