Camp Lejeune Justice Act

Camp Lejeune toxic water victims and grieving families are launching a third mass rally at the U.S. Capitol next week, demanding lawmakers pass a crucial legislative fix to clear a massive backlog of stalled lawsuits.

Jeanette Vitullo’s connection to Camp Lejeune began in the mid-1970s, before she was even born. She belongs to a vulnerable group of victims exposed to the contaminated water while still developing in the womb.

The court has scheduled pre-trial status conferences for September 10 at the federal courthouse in Raleigh. According to the court's scheduling orders, trials in those cases will be scheduled for 30 to 45 days following the pre-trial conferences. That would put those trials on the court's calendar sometime between October 10 and October 25.

Veterans and grieving families gathered in Jacksonville Wednesday, urging Congress to speed up compensation for people affected by Camp Lejeune’s contaminated drinking water. The group also marched from the Freedom Fountain to Baby Heaven, an infant cemetery at Lejeune Memorial Gardens.

Advocates and families plan to gather at Jacksonville's Freedom Fountain for a solemn walk to the children’s cemetery known as 'Baby Heaven.' Wednesday's protest is intended to put a human face on a legal battle often reduced to statistics, settlements, and court filings, and continue to push for passage of the Ensuring Justice for Camp Lejeune Victims Act.

In a national lawsuit, parents claimed taking acetaminophen during pregnancy caused their children to develop autism or ADHD. A higher appeals court recently issued a major ruling on how strictly trial judges must vet medical experts and scientific data before a jury is allowed to hear it. Now, federal lawyers have formally flagged that case for the Camp Lejeune judges, hoping to tighten restrictions on what science is allowed at trial.

Congresswoman Deborah Ross said Republican leaders transformed what is usually a bipartisan defense measure by adding the SAVE America Act, which would impose stricter proof-of-citizenship requirements for voter registration. House Republican leaders also declined to allow a floor vote on a bipartisan amendment she co-sponsored to revise the Camp Lejeune Justice Act of 2022; Ross said the proposal would help toxic-water claimants receive fairer and faster judicial review.

For more than thirty years, the federal government estimates that nearly one million military service personnel, their families, and civilian employees drank, cooked with, and bathed in water severely poisoned by industrial solvents at U.S. Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune. Brian Amburgey formed the grassroots advocacy group Lejeune Veterans for Justice and is organizing a mass rally at the Lejeune Memorial Gardens in Jacksonville on August 19th.

“The court pretty much laid it down. They told both sides, quit messing around, get this done. You have until October 30th."

Long-time advocates for service members, dependents, and civilian employees sickened by decades of water contamination at Camp Lejeune argue that incremental court orders do nothing to fix a fundamentally stalled process.