The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to take up a wrongful death lawsuit brought by a Brooklyn man whose father died after being released from a nursing home where COVID-positive patients were housed under former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's 2020 directive. The high court offered no explanation for its decision, leaving in place lower court rulings that shielded Cuomo with qualified immunity.
The denial ends Daniel Arbeeny's years-long legal fight to hold Cuomo and his then-health commissioner, Howard Zucker, accountable for a policy that critics say funneled thousands of infected patients into facilities full of the most vulnerable New Yorkers. Cuomo's camp wasted no time declaring victory.
Rich Azzopardi, Cuomo's longtime spokesman, told Fox News Digital:
"Every investigation and every court to examine these claims has reached the same conclusion: there was no wrongdoing by Governor Cuomo or his administration. Today, the Supreme Court joins that list."
That framing deserves scrutiny. A court declining to hear a case is not the same as a court finding no wrongdoing. The Supreme Court denies certiorari for all sorts of procedural and strategic reasons. Azzopardi's characterization conflates legal immunity with moral absolution, a distinction that matters to the families who buried loved ones.
Arbeeny's lawsuit centered on Cuomo's March 25, 2020 directive, which barred nursing homes from refusing admission to patients solely because they had tested positive for COVID-19. The stated purpose, as the New York Post reported, was to free up hospital beds for patients with more acute needs and to return individuals "who were no longer contagious back to facilities who could provide them with adequate care."
Norman Arbeeny, Daniel's 89-year-old father, died in 2020 after being released from a Cobble Hill nursing home where COVID patients were housed. His son sued Cuomo and Zucker under both a federal law covering deprivation of rights and a state wrongful death statute. A district court dismissed the case on qualified immunity grounds, and the Manhattan-based Second Circuit Court of Appeals left that dismissal in place.
Cuomo's legal team pointed to a New York State Department of Health report stating that the Cobble Hill facility had its first COVID-positive patient admitted days after Norman Arbeeny was discharged, an argument meant to break the causal chain between the directive and his death.
But the broader numbers tell a grimmer story. New York Department of Health records obtained by Fox News showed Cuomo's administration reported 8,505 nursing home deaths through January 2021. The actual figure topped 12,000. That gap, more than 3,500 unreported deaths, has never been satisfactorily explained by anyone in Cuomo's orbit.
The Washington Examiner noted that subsequent evidence cited by New York Attorney General Letitia James indicated deaths connected to the policy may have reached as high as 15,000, and that figures were allegedly suppressed in the final state report. Judge Katherine Polk Failla, who dismissed the federal civil case, wrote that "the Court's sympathy for Plaintiffs and their loved ones simply cannot supplant governing law." Sympathy, in other words, was not the problem. The law was.
Daniel Arbeeny was blunt in his reaction. He told the New York Post on Tuesday:
"The Supreme Court doesn't erase what was done and the truth of what happened. Nine thousand COVID-positive patients were forced into nursing homes with deadly consequences."
He had earlier told Fox News that his father's death was preventable because "the governor decided to lie about it." His brother, Peter Arbeeny, told Brooklyn Paper that Cuomo needed to face the families directly. "You need to face us and apologize. If you are going to lead you are going to lead for all of us," Peter said.
The Supreme Court's refusal to hear the case follows a pattern of the justices declining to wade into politically charged disputes, leaving lower court rulings undisturbed without comment. That silence can be read many ways, none of them amount to exoneration.
Azzopardi, for his part, leaned hard into the narrative that every institution had cleared Cuomo. He said the DOJ, the New York County District Attorney's office, and the New York State Attorney General's office all conducted independent reviews and found Cuomo's nursing home guidance "consistent with federal policy at the time." He added that the policy "aligned with actions taken on Democratic and Republican states across the country during a once-in-a-century pandemic."
That claim is partially true. Several states adopted similar directives early in the pandemic. But few saw the scale of nursing home deaths that New York did, and fewer still were caught systematically underreporting the toll. The gap between the 8,505 figure Cuomo's team reported and the 12,000-plus actual deaths is not a rounding error. It is a cover-up by any reasonable definition.
The New York County District Attorney's office closed its probe into the nursing home deaths in 2022. That decision drew sharp criticism from both sides of the aisle. New York State Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Democrat from Flushing, said in a Fox & Friends interview that Cuomo's lawyers and "PR team" wanted the public to believe Cuomo had been "absolved." Fox News chief meteorologist Janice Dean, who lost both of her in-laws in New York nursing homes during the pandemic, said the probe closure suggested a political "deal" between Albany and top prosecutors.
Whether or not a deal existed, the pattern is clear: every institutional check that could have imposed accountability either declined jurisdiction, invoked immunity, or quietly closed its file. The families were left with nothing but grief and a political talking point that both parties occasionally picked up and put down again when convenient.
The nursing home issue did resurface during Cuomo's 2025 New York City mayoral campaign. A bipartisan group, including Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, current Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Brooklyn State Senator Zellnor Myrie, made the policy a focal point and protested together. The fact that figures from both parties united on this issue suggests the anger runs deeper than partisan posturing.
The Supreme Court has had a busy and contentious term, with the justices navigating everything from sharp internal divisions on policing cases to questions about its own institutional integrity. In that context, the decision to pass on the Cuomo nursing home case may reflect the court's reluctance to open a door that could expose pandemic-era executive orders across multiple states to wrongful death liability.
That is a defensible legal posture. But it offers cold comfort to families who watched their parents and grandparents die in facilities that were ordered, by the governor's own directive, to accept COVID-positive patients.
The legal shield that protected Cuomo throughout this litigation is qualified immunity, a doctrine that bars civil suits against government officials unless they violated "clearly established" law. Courts have applied it broadly to pandemic-era decisions, reasoning that officials were making choices under unprecedented conditions with limited information.
Azzopardi seized on this, telling Fox News Digital: "The facts are settled and the highest court has spoken." But qualified immunity does not settle facts. It settles whether a lawsuit can proceed. The two are not the same, no matter how many times Cuomo's team repeats the line.
The court's decision also arrives at a moment when high-profile case dismissals are drawing public attention to how the legal system handles politically sensitive matters. Whether the subject is contempt of Congress or pandemic-era nursing home orders, the pattern that troubles ordinary Americans is the same: powerful people walk away while the consequences fall on everyone else.
Daniel Arbeeny's father is gone. More than 12,000 New York nursing home residents are gone. The man who signed the directive that sent COVID-positive patients into their facilities is running for mayor. And the highest court in the land has decided it has nothing to say about any of it.
Cuomo's spokesman said families' pain was "manipulated and politicized." He is half right. The pain was real. The manipulation came from an administration that underreported deaths by thousands, fought transparency at every turn, and now claims vindication because no court would let the case through the door.
Meanwhile, the court's own internal workings have drawn scrutiny in recent months, with leaked memos revealing tensions over how the justices handle their docket. The decision to let the Cuomo case die without comment fits a broader institutional preference for silence on the hardest questions.
No criminal charges. No civil liability. No public accounting. Cuomo walks free, campaigns freely, and claims the courts proved him right. The families bury their dead and are told the system worked.
Qualified immunity may be good law. But when it shields officials who underreported deaths by the thousands and sent infected patients into nursing homes full of the elderly, it is worth asking whom the law is really protecting, and from what.
