Posted on 04/14/2017 9:25:23 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Joann Davis had a moon rock. Yes, it was real. A gift, she said, from Neil Armstrong to her late husband.
She also had an ill son and the Lake Elsinore resident wanted to help with his medical care. So she contacted NASA about her intention to sell it.
That led to a nightmare situation on May 19, 2011, when Davis stood in the parking lot of a Denny’s restaurant in pants soaked in urine, answering questions from a federal agent about a rice-sized piece of moon.
“He kept saying, ‘You will be going to federal court, you will be going to federal jail,’ ” Davis said Friday.
An indignant federal appeals court on Thursday criticized Davis’ detention by NASA agent Norman Conley in the Denny’s parking lot, calling it “unreasonably prolonged and unnecessarily degrading.”
Conley detained Davis even though he knew she was nearly 75 years old, had urinated in her pants during the sting, had reached out to NASA herself and was having financial problems, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said.
The court was “determining whether a federal agent could be sued for wrongful detention under these circumstances,” said Davis’ Redlands-based lawyer, Peter Schlueter. And their decision was “absolutely, yes.”
Lunar material gathered on the Apollo missions is considered government property, and her email prompted an investigation that brought six armed officers to the Denny’s that day in a sting operation to seize the rock.
Instead of asking Davis to surrender the rock to NASA, Conley “organized a sting operation involving six armed officers to forcibly seize a lucite paperweight containing a moon rock the size of a rice grain from an elderly grandmother,” 9th Circuit Chief Judge Sidney Thomas wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
It was all a test to see how Freepers react. Thanks for playing.
Thanks for the criticism, but was just joking about Whoopi G thinking she saw the flag waving on the moon in a picture. Therefore, she believed the space mission was faked.
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