Museum director sues feds over artifact raid

The founding director of the Custer Battlefield Museum in Montana said this week that his constitutional rights were violated when two dozen federal agents raided the museum, his home and other businesses in 2005 and 2008.

Agents, some armed with automatic weapons, were looking for any evidence that Chris Kortlander was illegally buying and selling American Indian artifacts when they surrounded his property in Garryowen, Mont., in March 2005. Yet, five years have passed and Kortlander has not been charged with a crime.

Kortlander’s federal lawsuit said his rights to free speech, to bear arms, to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures and nearly a half-dozen other rights were violated in the raids. It targets individual agents — rather than the agencies involved in the raids — as part of what is called a Biven’s action.

UTAH News

Destruction to public and personal property without sentiment. Sounds just like the DEA raids in NYC when they get a tip, act on it, destroy someone's home, then realize they are in the wrong place. Meanwhile the home owners are left with a torn up house and life. Our government should be held to a greater degree of responsibility with issues like this. Right now it seems they feel they're trying to do the right thing, oops we screwed up and then we'll try harder the next time attitude. So sick of this rhetoric.

I can't say I have any sympathy for this guy. He has probably made a good living (as have others) on trading items from a part of history that saw many people innocently murdered in the name of America, land of the free.

If the market he and those others deal in has "bottomed out" then maybe they should find another business, and if it bottomed out since this raid then it obviously sent a message across the board, and those who were trading illegally began to cease trading. Good.

I wouldn't usually support the authorities in actions like the raids they undertook, but what goes around comes around and any indians who are lucky enough to have been left buried from these profiteers should be dancing in their graves round their eternal campfire in the sky.