65 A. 156 | Conn. | 1906
Section 4134 of the General Statutes provides that "every person who shall loan money upon a note secured by mortgage upon personal property, in which the sum of money loaned is stated to be greater than the amount actually loaned, or in which the rate of interest to be charged is greater than the rate allowed by law to be charged by pawnbrokers," shall be fined, or imprisoned, or both, and that the mortgage and note shall be void. This statute is distinctly penal and should therefore receive a strict construction, and no act should be held to be in violation of it which does not fall within its spirit and the fair import of its language. Daggett v. State,
The instrument by which the defendant's note to the plaintiff was secured was a bill of sale, absolute in form, and without any condition, reservation, or clause of defeasance. A court of equity, if appealed to, might give it the effect of a mortgage. Lovell v. Hammond Co.,
The statute evidently requires some other explanation, and it is to be readily found in the fact that our statutes do provide for the execution in a prescribed form and the recording of mortgages of certain personal property, which shall be effectual as security against all the world. These instruments so drawn are mortgages in both form and name, and when recorded are mortgages in effect. The same potent reasons which have led to the requirement that mortgages of realty should correctly state the debt secured thereby, in order that the required notice to the world through our recording system should not convey false information, exist why these recorded mortgages of personality should not overstate the debt for the security of which they are given. It is such instruments as these, which the law requires to be publicly promulgated by recording, and to which, when recorded, the law attaches a peculiar importance and accords a peculiar protection, which are within the spirit and fair import of the language of the statute *342 recited. One like the present bill of sale we think is not.
The trial court, therefore, correctly held that the defense that the notes sued upon were void must fail.
There is no error.
In this opinion the other judges concurred.