Finn Rasmussen who asked: >Wasn't the sentence for illegal EXPORT of the material? The type material was >exported back to a herbarium in Peru, lest it should be confiscated and >destroyed by US authorities - which might have invalidated the name!
The sentence may have been for both, possession and smuggling a "smuggled by Kovach" CITES APP I orchid species back to Peru. However, the light sentence, in view of what could have been, seems to indicate that possession was considered more so than smuggling. I could be wrong! The indictment reads as follows: WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Department of Justice today filed criminal charges in the U.S. District Court in Tampa, Florida, against Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, Inc. and Wesley E. Higgins for violating the Endangered Species Act by possessing, and later returning to Peru, an orchid that was smuggled into the United States. The maximum penalty for this offense is one year imprisonment and/or a $100,000 fine.
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