Agents of the U.S. government are entitled to immunity from lawsuits for what they do in the line of duty, as long as they do it right, in accord with the Constitution.
But what one NASA investigator did to Joann Davis, a financially distressed widow of an engineer on the Apollo program who was trying to raise a little money, was too much for a federal court of appeals to stomach. And on Thursday, the judges let her suit against him go forward.
Here’s what happened, as described in an opinion issued by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Pasadena.
Robert Davis was, by all accounts, a brilliant engineer, employed by North American Rockwell as manager of NASA’s Apollo 11 program.
When he left, he took with him two mementos: One “contained a rice-grain-sized fragment of lunar material, or ‘moonrock;’ the other contained a small piece of the Apollo 11 heat shield.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/04/14/humiliating-sting-operation-against-elderly-widow-of-apollo-engineer-draws-court-rebuke/?utm_term=.edfe6b4db440
