The government has agreed to return $1.1 million that it seized from an armored car company that was transporting cash from state-licensed cannabis businesses in California.
In return for the returned funds, the armored car company, Empyreal Logistics, has agreed to drop the lawsuit against the government, filed in California. The suit alleged that the seizures in California and Kansas were illegal.
Empyreal said, in a press release, that the settlement does not affect the separate civil forfeiture action filed in Kansas. That being said, the California and Kansas cases have nearly identical fact patterns, suggesting that the government may agree to a similar resolution in the Kansas case.
Last year one of Empyreal's vehicles was stopped in Dickinson County, Kansas, by a sheriff's deputy who seized $166,000 in cash that was being transported from legal medical marijuana dispensaries in Kansas City, Missouri to a credit union in Colorado.
The Kansas U.S. Attorney's office subsequently filed a civil forfeiture action, arguing that the seized cash was traceable to sales that violated the federal Controlled Substances act.
You can read more about the underlying cases in our previous coverage of the cases, here.