It's been three years since the first hearing for people who filed claims in the massive Camp Lejeune contaminated water settlement, but there still hasn't been a single trial.
Thousands of veterans and family members are entitled to sue the government under a law Congress passed in 2022, which accepted responsibility and allowed compensation for a long list of illnesses affecting people who lived on the North Carolina Marine Corps base.
Now, the plaintiffs and the judges tasked with handling the lawsuits are growing frustrated.
By law, the suits can be heard only in the U.S. Eastern District of North Carolina, where judges have said that settling the cases quickly is critical. People were exposed to the tainted water from 1953 to 1987, which means many are not only sick but also elderly.
Jason Johns, the head of the National Legislative Committee for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, has been following the settlement process closely. He said one law firm is representing about 2000 plaintiffs, and nearly 10 percent have died in the past two years.
"Next year it's going to be 20 percent," he told the crowd at a recent rally at the U.S. Capitol to support legislation that would speed the settlements. "The year after that it's going to be 30 percent," he said. "In five to 10 years, there will be nobody left."
In an interview, he blamed the delays mainly on the U.S. Department of Justice lawyers defending the Navy. He said they have been stalling, in part by filing frivolous motions trying to re-litigate responsibility that Congress already admitted to. They also filed a motion to block the use of the government's own massive study of the toxins in the water.
"It creates an imbalance in the negotiations for settlements to say, 'You know what, yeah, I've only got so many years left,' or 'My family's financially desperate. We need the money right now. We'll take a third of what we might have gotten five years ago.'"
While plaintiffs say they're jaded by years of delays, a recent sharply-worded court order has given them at least some hope. The judges handling the thousands of lawsuits have ordered lawyers on both sides to hammer out a mass settlement plan by the end of October.
"It's something," said Jim Ward, a retired Marine who lives in Georgia and has an aggressive form of bladder cancer. "Do I have much confidence? We'll have to see what goes on with it, but it's something more than what we have had."
Ward served at Camp Lejeune in the early 1980s. His wife, who was with him on base, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Both types of illness have been linked to the toxins in the water.
Ward said he also believes government lawyers are intentionally slowing progress to use the plaintiffs' ages and illnesses as leverage for low-ball settlement offers.
"What a lawsuit means to you at 60 when you have some of your health, and what it means to you at 80 or 85 when your health is almost all gone because of the illness is two different things," he said. "You tend to settle for less, and you say, you know what, I'll do anything that y'all tell me."
The Department of Justice didn't respond to a request for an interview. But a former top DOJ litigator said he doesn't believe the department would intentionally cause delays.
"DOJ has no reason to drag it out," said Paul Figley, who spent 30 years with the DOJ, half of that as deputy director of the torts branch. "There's no there there."
"In these kinds of cases, the government attorney is put in the position of having a set of facts and circumstances and law and being responsible to make the adversary process work," Figley said. "I would expect that they would raise all the defenses that are reasonable and available to them, but they're not going to get bonuses for winning these cases."
Figley, now a law professor emeritus at American University and a visiting professor at Villanova, followed some of the early developments in the case, and said he knew the attorney who is the lead government litigator.
"He's just saying this is the law, this is what you have to show. If you can't show it, then you shouldn't win," Figley said.
More than 400,000 people have filed claims with the Navy. The 2022 law allows them to sue the government if the Navy doesn't make them a timely offer they want to accept. Through an administrative process, the Navy has begun making offers between $100,000 and $550,000, depending on the nature of each case, but has reached terms with fewer than one percent of those who have filed claims.
Meanwhile, nearly 4,000 claimants have filed lawsuits.
The Eastern District of North Carolina has just four judges. At that first hearing back in 2023, Judge James Dever said the cases would have to be almost entirely settled out of court via the administrative process or as part of a mass settlement agreement. Otherwise, he said, it would take hundreds of years to try them all.
The dozens of law firms representing plaintiffs are themselves represented by a small leadership group appointed by the court. The court's new order says they and the Justice Department lawyers must meet every week under the supervision of two "settlement masters" — court officers appointed by the judges.
If the two sides don't reach an agreement by the deadline, it says the court may replace the Plaintiff's Leadership Group attorneys and take unspecified actions against the government defense team.
Plaintiff Jim Ward said that regardless of who's most at fault for the delays, it's time for them to end. He said the nation admitted in the 2022 law that it poisoned Marines and their families, and there's been more than enough time to decide who should be compensated and how.
"We don't need another four years, three years, two years of this being argued back and forth over who's right, who's wrong," he said. "Let's get this settled, let's get it done, let's get these people taken care of, let's get them so they can continue with their healing."
This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.
