U.S. Government Seeks Dismissal of Camp Lejeune Kidney Cancer Lawsuits

Motion for summary judgment comes as more than 500,000 claims continue to move forward involving various injuries linked to contaminated water at Camp Lejeune between the mid-1950s and late-1980s.

The U.S. government has asked a group of federal judges to grant a summary judgment motion that may dismiss Camp Lejeune kidney cancer lawsuits, claiming the plaintiffs’ expert opinions linking water contamination at the U.S. Marine training base to the disease are unreliable and inadmissible.

In August 2022, the Camp Lejeune Justice Act (CLJA) was signed into law, which provided a two-year filing window for individuals who lived, served or worked on the North Carolina military base from the mid-1950s to late 1980s to seek financial compensation for various types of cancer and other ailments linked to toxic chemicals that contaminated the base’s water supply.

After that window closed last summer, the government faced nearly 500,000 administrative claims and lawsuits, involving dozens of different injuries believed to be caused by exposure to the contaminated Camp Lejeune water.

The litigation is currently being overseen by four different U.S. District Judges in the Eastern District of North Carolina, including Richard E. Myers II, Terrence W. Boyle, Louise W. Flanagan and James C. Dever III. While the U.S. government announced an elective settlement option for Camp Lejeune lawsuits in September 2023, many claims remain unresolved given the minimal payouts offered for many injuries.

To help gauge how the court may respond to certain evidence and testimony that will be presented throughout thousands of claims, the four judges are preparing groups of claims involving different categories of injuries for early trial dates.

In October 2023, the Court established a Camp Lejeune Lawsuit Track 1 criteria, and the parties selected a group of 100 cases to go through early discovery involving the following five categories of injuries:

• Bladder cancer
• Kidney cancer
• Leukemia
• Parkinson’s disease
• Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma

The Court then directed the parties to narrow the list to a group of 25 claims that will be eligible for trial, including five cases from each of the five injury categories, with plaintiffs selecting three of the claims and the U.S. government selecting the other two.

U.S. Seeks Camp Lejeune Summary Judgments

On September 10, the United States government filed a Motion for Summary Judgment (PDF), asking that the lawsuits of the five plaintiffs selected to represent kidney cancer claims all be thrown out. The government argues that the plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate that their kidney cancer was caused by exposure to perchloroethylene, benzene and vinyl chloride in Camp Lejeune drinking water.

“As outlined in these Motions to Exclude, because Plaintiffs’ experts’ analyses are unreliable and their opinions inadmissible, Plaintiffs do not have sufficient evidence to prove that their alleged exposures to benzene, Camp Lejeune water caused their kidney cancers as either a matter of general causation or specific causation.”

– Memorandum in Support of U.S.’s Motion for Summary Judgment

The argument comes despite the government’s earlier promise that plaintiffs only needed to have served, worked or lived on Camp Lejeune during the decades when its water was contaminated and had a kidney cancer diagnosis to qualify for compensation.

However, now the government argues that reliable expert testimony is needed to prove causation for kidney cancer, despite the fact that avoiding those kinds of requirements decades after the exposures occur was a major impetus for the CLJA.

Regardless of whether the kidney injury claims survive the motion, the court will continue preparing to hold the rest of the bellwether trials.

Even though the outcome of these early bellwether trials will not have a binding impact on other claims in the litigation, they will be closely watched by lawyers involved in the cases, as the average amounts of any Camp Lejeune lawsuit payouts awarded may help the parties in global settlement negotiations for various types of injuries.

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