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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Troodon, post: 208300, member: 4626&quot;]Most of the evidence seems to point to the government as the victims of theft, not the perpetrators.&nbsp; Unless Switt&#039;s descendants can somehow prove that Israel Switt somehow acquired the double eagles legally, it looks like an open and shut case for the government.&nbsp; The only reason that the government decided to call to the one double eagle legal is there was good evidence that Customs allowed it to leave the country to go into King Farouk&#039;s collection.&nbsp; There is no such documentation in the case of these 10.&nbsp; It looks the government is holding all the cards in this case.&nbsp; (Note that in the Farouk double eagle the government compromised to split the sale only if it was conceded that the double eagle was government property.)</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m trying to look at both sides of this, but besides some theory that there is no actual evidence for, there isn&#039;t any real proof that Israel Switt acquired the double eagles in some legal fashion, and unless Switt&#039;s family can come up with any, I&#039;d have to say the government is in the right to keep them.</p><p><br /></p><p>Though it might would be a bad precendent... there are many other rare US coins and patterns that probably were not legally made or left the mint illegally.&nbsp; There&#039;s pretty good evidence for example, that the 5 1913 Liberty Head nickels were not produced legally, and about half of the 1804 silver dollars are known to have been illegally restruck.&nbsp; Some wonder if the government by this line of reasoning would have the right to confiscate this too.&nbsp; However in these cases the crime broken wasn&#039;t really theft, but unauthorized mintages.&nbsp; Yhe 1933 double eagles were fully legal to mint, just not to have left the Mint, so the same arguments wouldn&#039;t necessarily hold.</p><p><br /></p><p>Even though it seems to me the government is in the right, I&#039;d still hope they&#039;d preserve the double eagles rather than melt them down, it would be a shame to have them lost to history.&nbsp; The government doesn&#039;t seem willing to extend the same deal that they did for the first one, but why not?&nbsp; In the first case the coin was turned up after a government raid.&nbsp; These 10 were voluntarily given to the government to have them authenticated.&nbsp; Would seem at least fair to extend the same compromise, sell them and split the proceeds.&nbsp; Probably won&#039;t happen though, the one and only double eagle they declared legal they were pretty emphatic that they wouldn&#039;t declare any others legal.&nbsp; The government&#039;s position is that to do so would basically be to reward a theft and that it would weaken their authoity to be the only legal entity that can issue currency.&nbsp; It seems the reason the government was willing to compromise in the first case is that Fenton was willing to concede that, and there was good evidence, albeit accidentally, that the government allowed the double eagle to leave the country (mainly due to the ignorance of Customs agents who had no idea that it shouldn&#039;t).&nbsp; I just don&#039;t see any point of compromise in this case... but we&#039;ll see eventually I suppose.&nbsp; However I wouldn&#039;t bet much on the Switts&#039; case.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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