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Louisiana Court of Appeal • 1986

Charrier v. Bell

496 So. 2d 601

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Takeaway

In short, this case holds that burial goods are not abandoned property subject to private excavation and appropriation, and an excavator who knowingly acts at his own risk cannot use unjust enrichment to shift the costs to the descendants whose burial grounds were disturbed.

Background

Leonard Charrier, an Angola prison corrections officer and self-described amateur archaeologist, believed that Trudeau Plantation was the site of a historic Tunica Indian village. Beginning in 1967, he used a metal detector and excavated roughly 150 burial sites over three years, removing an estimated two to two-and-a-half tons of burial goods, including pottery, weapons, tools, beads, jewelry, and European trade items. Although Charrier initially believed he had permission from Frank Hoshman, he later learned Hoshman was only the property's caretaker. Charrier also concealed the excavation's location for years while attempting to sell the collection.

When Charrier could not establish marketable title, he sued the plantation's nonresident landowners for a declaration that he owned the artifacts. Alternatively, he sought compensation for his labor and expenses under Louisiana's action for unjust enrichment. The State purchased Trudeau Plantation and the artifacts from the landowners in 1978. After federal recognition in 1981, the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe intervened and asserted title to the burial goods. The State ultimately subordinated its claim to the Tribe's claim.

The trial court held that the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe owned the artifacts. It found that Charrier could not acquire them by occupancy because they had not been abandoned, and it denied unjust-enrichment relief because Charrier excavated for his own gain while knowingly operating without the landowners' consent. Charrier appealed.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe sufficiently proved that it descended from the Tunica people associated with the Trudeau Plantation burial ground.

Holding

Yes. The evidence adequately established that the Tribe was the successor to the historical Tunica people and included descendants of the people who lived at Trudeau Plantation.

Reasoning

The court relied substantially on the federal government's final determination recognizing the contemporary Tunica-Biloxi Tribe. That determination found the Tribe to be the successor of the historical Tunica, Ofo, Avoyel, and part of the Biloxi tribes.

The Tribe did not need to produce a perfect genealogical chain linking every modern member to every person buried at Trudeau Plantation. The evidence showed that at least part of the historical Tunica tribe lived at Trudeau between 1731 and 1764, and no meaningful contrary evidence disputed that connection.

Evidence that the Tunicas had intermixed with other tribes did not defeat their status as descendants or successors of the historical Tunica community. Intermixing could not erase the Tribe's demonstrated historical relationship to the burial site and its goods.

Issue #2

Whether Charrier acquired ownership of the excavated burial goods by occupancy because the Tunicas had abandoned them.

Holding

No. Burial goods interred with the dead are not abandoned property available for acquisition by a stranger who later discovers them.

Reasoning

Under the former Louisiana Civil Code provisions governing occupancy, a person could acquire a thing that belonged to no one or that its owner had abandoned with the intent not to keep it. Charrier therefore could prevail only if the burial goods had been left with an intent that another person could take them as owner.

Burial with a decedent may relinquish immediate physical possession, but it does not objectively show an intent to surrender ownership to whoever later finds the property. Rather, burial goods are placed with the dead for spiritual, religious, moral, or customary purposes, with the expectation that they will remain there permanently.

The court drew on French civil-law authorities, the source of Louisiana's occupancy doctrine. Those authorities distinguished true abandoned property, or res derelictae, from objects buried with human remains. Burial goods are not treasure or ownerless objects because they were not deposited for temporary concealment or left for the first taker.

Treating grave goods as abandoned would invite commercial speculation and the desecration of burial places. It would make graves vulnerable to plunder immediately after burial or after descendants moved away, a result the court rejected.

The cases Charrier cited did not support his claim. They involved, respectively, a cemetery sale conditioned on reinterment of remains, jewelry validly sold by a decedent's heir, and land that had once been used temporarily as a cemetery; none held that an excavator may acquire burial goods over descendants' objections.

The court expressly did not decide whether the Tunicas had abandoned any real-property interest in Trudeau Plantation. The dispute concerned ownership of the artifacts only, and the ruling was not intended to unsettle Louisiana land titles.

Issue #3

Whether Charrier could recover his excavation time and expenses from the Tribe under the Louisiana action for unjust enrichment, actio de in rem verso.

Holding

No. Charrier failed to establish the requisite unjust impoverishment and lack of legal justification for any benefit received by the Tribe.

Reasoning

An unjust-enrichment claim requires an enrichment, a corresponding impoverishment, a connection between them, no legal justification for the enrichment or impoverishment, and no other legal remedy. The court questioned whether the Tribe had been enriched at all, because the excavation had disturbed ancestral burial grounds and caused substantial offense rather than an uncomplicated benefit.

In any event, Charrier's claimed loss was not the kind of impoverishment that supports actio de in rem verso. Most of his excavation occurred after he knew that Hoshman was not the owner, and his secrecy about the location, failure to contact the landowners, and removal of two-and-a-half tons of artifacts demonstrated that he acted knowingly and at his own risk.

Louisiana's unjust-enrichment doctrine does not compensate a person whose claimed impoverishment results from that person's own fault, negligence, or voluntary risk-taking. Charrier excavated in pursuit of his own anticipated gain despite knowing that both the property owners and the Tunicas might object.

Any benefit received by the Tribe was legally justified because descendants have legally protected interests in preventing disturbance of their relatives' graves and in obtaining relief for cemetery desecration. Requiring the Tribe to reimburse the person who disturbed the graves would undermine those protections.