illustrator cs5- paste in place not changing layers

I'm trying to re-organize a project that has gotten a lot of objects stuck in the wrong layers.

For some reason when I select a group of objects and try to move them to another artboard my paste in place command does not move them to the new layer I select. If I try a standard paste operation and choose to re-align the object I find that it also does not paste to the correct layer.

My layers are all visible and not locked. Grouped/ungrouped objects have same behavior.

Has my project corrupted or is this something simple I don't know about?