Thread by @JamesWClark

This morning @taskandpurpose ran a story on a soldier’s widow who is mounting a lawsuit claiming that military care providers committed malpractice when allegedly they failed to catch her husband’s stomach cancer over a 4 year period.
taskandpurpose.com/fort-campbell-…

On Oct. 31, 2018, Sgt. Jeremy Seals died following a prolonged battle with stomach cancer. He was diagnosed by VA care providers in 2016 with stage 4 stomach cancer, months after leaving the Army. The diagnosis came after 4 years of repeated visits to military doctors.

His widow and attorneys with @WhistleblowerLF allege that mil care providers missed the cancer, failed to heed the patient’s requests for a second opinion and ignored notes in his record indicating a CT scan showed a mass. It's unlikely the case will ever move past "allegations."

Due to a 1950 legal rule called the Feres Doctrine, service members and their families are barred from suing the government for negligence or wrongdoing “for injuries to members of the armed forces arising from activities incident to military service."
taskandpurpose.com/feres-doctrine…

If you're a victim of military medical malpractice, due to the Feres Doctrine, you have few options. 1) You can accept what happened, take whatever disability compensation or life insurance payout is offered, and let that be it.

Or 2) You can set off on a long journey to demand justice, or more accurately, to demand the same rights that every other American gets: A fair shake in the court and a chance to make your argument and have the facts speak for themselves.

There’s a few ways to do this: One is to go through the court system, file a claim, have it dismissed, then file an appeal, and have that dismissed. All so you can slowly work your way to the nation's highest court. It's a process that takes years.

Consider the case of Walter Daniel, who filed a wrongful death claim in 2015 after his wife Navy Lt. Rebekah Daniel died during a low-risk childbirth the year before.

Daniel has been fighting to move his case forward for the last four years. Currently, he and @LuveraLaw are waiting on the Supreme Court to decide whether or not they'll hear his petition.
taskandpurpose.com/military-widow…

Another option is to petition the court of public opinion, and build momentum there, so that people eventually (maybe) begin pounding on their Congressmen and women's doors. Like the courts, it's a time-consuming effort with no guarantee of success.
taskandpurpose.com/feres-doctrine…

In the meantime, all victims and their families can do is wait, and hope for a change to the long-standing legal rule (either through Congress in the form of legislation,or a new Supreme Court ruling on a current case.)

Until that time, service members and their loved ones “have no voice” Cheryl Seals, the widow of Sgt. Jeremy Seals, told us.

"They basically signed their life over to the government and the government is supposed to take care of them as best they can and they're not," Seals added. "They have stripped them of their voice. They have stripped them of their rights."