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Apollo 11 Moon Rock Bag Belongs To Buyer, Not NASA, Judge Rules (behindtheblack.com)
schwit1 quotes a report from Behind The Black: A federal judge has ruled that NASA has no right to confiscate an Apollo 11 lunar rock sample bag that had been purchased legally, even though the sale itself had been in error. CollectSPACE.com reports: "Judge J. Thomas Marten ruled in the U.S. District Court for Kansas that Nancy Carlson of Inverness, Illinois, obtained the title to the historic artifact as 'a good faith purchaser, in a sale conducted according to law.' The government had petitioned the court to reverse the sale and return the lunar sample bag to NASA. 'She is entitled to possession of the bag,' Marten wrote in his order." This court case will hopefully give some legal standing to the private owners of other artifacts or lunar samples that NASA had given away and then demanded their return, decades later. Space.com's report adds: "The zippered cloth pouch, which was labeled in bold black letters 'Lunar Sample Return,' was used on July 20, 1969, as an 'outer decontamination bag' to protect the first moon rocks retrieved from the surface of the moon as they were delivered to Earth by Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. Carlson purchased the bag for $995 in February 2015, at a Texas auction held on behalf of the U.S. Marshals Service. The bag had been forfeited along with other artifacts found in the home of Max Ary, a former curator convicted in 2006 of stealing and selling space artifacts that belonged to the Cosmosphere space museum in Hutchinson, Kansas."
The Marshals Service made the error. These kinds of property related claims never expire. NASA is eligible for the bag long after Carson's death so even if this court has made the obvious error, they can claim the bag back from the formed estate, or from any subsequent buyer.
It may have been stolen, but it wasn't stolen from NASA. NASA gave it away. It was later stolen from a museum, then recovered by the police.
They could have transferred ownership, but isn't that unusual? I thought most such items were formally loaners even if they're casually referred to as donated and permanently on display. There's quite clear precedent here though, if something of yours is seized and forfeited it's lost. Doesn't matter if it was a theft, lease or a loan, it doesn't matter if you never knew it happened. I remember one case from civil forfeiture, they rented a sail boat and had got caught smuggling, boat was seized and sold before the owners knew. It was accepted as fact that they ran a rental agency and had no involvement in the smuggling attempt.
Did the owners get their boat back? Nope. Did they get compensated? Nope. They can only sue the jailbirds for the loss, the boat is now legally somebody else's property. So if they don't want to have one rule for NASA and one rule for everyone else, this is how it must be. When nobody contested the seizure, it was forfeited. At that point it stopped being whoever's property it was before and became the government's legal property, free of all history. And then it was lawfully sold. Is that "fair"? No, but it's how all police auctions work.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Actually, the governmen has every right to sell the government's stuff. Everyone ssrms to be missing the fact that NASA and the US Marshalls are two branches of the same legal entity. Just because the right hand wants it back, does that void the left hand's sale?