The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a wrongful death lawsuit against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, ending the last legal avenue for families who say his administration's COVID-19 nursing home directive contributed to the deaths of thousands of elderly residents. The court's denial of certiorari, reported by the New York Post, came without explanation, standard practice for the high court, but cold comfort for the grieving families left without recourse.
The case was led by Daniel Arbeeny of Brooklyn, whose 89-year-old father Norman, a Korean War veteran, died in 2020. Arbeeny filed suit in 2022 against Cuomo, now 68, and members of his former administration, alleging that a March 25, 2020 directive from the governor's office caused his father's death. That directive ordered New York nursing homes to accept patients who had tested positive for COVID-19.
Some 15,000 seniors died from COVID-19 in Empire State nursing homes. Arbeeny and the families who joined his lawsuit argued that the Cuomo administration's policy turned those facilities into incubators for the virus, forcing the most vulnerable population into close quarters with infected patients at the peak of the pandemic.
The legal path to Monday's denial ran through two lower courts. Eastern District of New York Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall dismissed the case in 2024, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld that dismissal. Both courts determined that Cuomo was protected by qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that shields government officials from civil liability for actions taken in their official capacity, unless those actions violate clearly established law.
Qualified immunity has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum in recent years, though for different reasons. In this case, it functioned as a near-impenetrable shield for a governor whose policy decisions had life-and-death consequences for tens of thousands of elderly New Yorkers. The Supreme Court's refusal to take up the appeal means no federal court will examine the merits of the families' claims.
Arbeeny said he was "disappointed" but defiant. In a statement to the Post, he laid out the stakes as he sees them:
"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 went further, accusing the Cuomo administration of a cover-up:
"The [Cuomo] administration lied about the deaths. The facts don't change. The death toll is horrific. It didn't have to happen. At some point, the truth will come out."
The Supreme Court has been at the center of several high-profile controversies in recent terms, from Justice Sotomayor's rare public apology for personal remarks about a colleague to major rulings reshaping federal regulatory power. Monday's order list drew less public attention, but for the families involved, the consequences are permanent.
Rich Azzopardi, a Cuomo spokesperson, wasted no time framing the decision as vindication. He told the Post that the ruling was the latest in a string of exonerations:
"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."
Azzopardi added: "The facts are settled and the highest court has spoken." He also sought to undermine Arbeeny's specific claim, stating that Norman Arbeeny was discharged from his nursing home in April 2020, about three weeks before that facility took in a COVID-positive patient.
That timeline, if accurate, complicates the direct causation argument in Arbeeny's case. But it does nothing to address the broader policy question: whether the March 25, 2020 directive, which applied statewide, contributed to the catastrophic death toll across New York's nursing home system. The lawsuit was never only about one family. It was about a policy that affected every long-term care facility in the state.
Azzopardi also struck a sympathetic note, saying that "for six long years, families have had to deal with unimaginable losses of loved ones from COVID and it doesn't get easier, especially when that pain was manipulated and politicized." The framing is notable: Cuomo's camp casts the families' pursuit of accountability as "politicized" grief, rather than a legitimate demand for answers from the government official who issued the order.
That framing sits uneasily alongside a separate, ongoing push for legal consequences. Just The News reported that House Oversight Chairman James Comer referred Cuomo to the Department of Justice on April 21, 2025, for possible criminal prosecution over allegedly false statements to Congress. The referral centers on Cuomo's testimony about the nursing home controversy, specifically, claims that he did not review a state health department report that House investigators say he reviewed, edited, and partly drafted.
Comer did not mince words in his statement on the referral. "Andrew Cuomo is a man with a history of corruption and deceit, now caught red-handed lying to Congress during the Select Subcommittee's investigation into the COVID-19 nursing home tragedy in New York," Comer said. He added: "Let's be clear: lying to Congress is a federal crime. Mr. Cuomo must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."
A House coronavirus subcommittee had already sent a similar referral last year, though criminal referrals from Congress do not compel prosecution. The final decision rests with the Justice Department. Whether DOJ acts remains an open question.
The nursing home scandal was not the only cloud over Cuomo's tenure. A 2021 report from the New York Attorney General alleged that Cuomo sexually harassed almost a dozen women during his time as governor. He resigned from office before his term concluded that same year. A congressional report also alleged Cuomo was involved in lowballing the nursing home death count, a charge that, combined with the harassment findings, made his political position untenable.
Questions of accountability and institutional integrity have surfaced repeatedly at the nation's highest court and in state governments alike. In Utah, for instance, the governor and GOP lawmakers launched an independent probe into a justice over alleged improper ties, a reminder that public trust in the judiciary depends on transparency and follow-through.
Cuomo attempted a political comeback last year, seeking to become mayor of New York City. Voters were unpersuaded. He lost both the Democratic primary and the general election to Zohran Mamdani. The defeat suggested that whatever legal immunity Cuomo may enjoy, political immunity has its limits.
Monday's order means Daniel Arbeeny has exhausted his options to appeal. No federal court will hear his claims on the merits. The qualified immunity doctrine, whatever its legal justification, has functioned here to insulate a former governor from civil liability for a policy that families say sent COVID-positive patients into the most vulnerable settings imaginable.
Cuomo's team argues that every investigation and every court has cleared him. That is technically true in the narrow legal sense: no court has found him liable, and no prosecutor has secured an indictment. But the families' grievance is not only legal. It is about a government that issued a directive, watched thousands die, and, in the families' telling, obscured the true death toll.
The Cuomo administration's stated rationale for the March 2020 directive was that it was needed to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed and to keep emergency facilities open for the seriously ill. That argument may have carried weight in the earliest, most uncertain days of the pandemic. But the directive remained in effect as evidence mounted that nursing homes were becoming the deadliest front of the crisis. The gap between the stated rationale and the observed outcome is where the families' anger lives.
The political landscape around the Supreme Court continues to shift, with Democrats rallying donors to influence future nominations and major rulings arriving on a range of issues. But for the families of 15,000 dead seniors in New York's nursing homes, the court's most consequential act this week was a single line on an order list: certiorari denied.
Meanwhile, the court's recent rulings on federal power and regulatory authority have drawn wide attention. This case drew far less. It involved no sweeping legal principle, no landmark opinion, no oral argument. Just a quiet refusal to look at what happened in New York's nursing homes, and who was responsible.
The legal system has spoken. Cuomo walks away without a trial. The DOJ referral from Chairman Comer sits on a desk somewhere in Washington, awaiting a decision that may never come. And the families, the ones who buried parents and grandparents during a pandemic, who watched a governor collect an Emmy and write a book while their loved ones died in understaffed facilities, are told the matter is settled.
It isn't settled. Not for them. And no order list changes that.
