Supreme Court declines wrongful death case against Cuomo over COVID nursing home orders

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a wrongful death lawsuit brought by a Brooklyn man who blamed former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's COVID-era nursing home directive for his father's death, leaving families who lost loved ones with no remaining federal avenue for accountability.

The court offered no explanation for its decision, as is standard when it denies certiorari. But the silence landed hard on Daniel Arbeeny, whose 89-year-old father Norman died in 2020 after being released from a Cobble Hill nursing home where COVID-positive patients were housed under Cuomo's policy.

For the Arbeeny family and thousands of others, the ruling closes the courthouse door on a question that has haunted New York politics for six years: whether Cuomo's March 25, 2020 guidance, which directed nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients, contributed to a wave of preventable deaths in the state's long-term care facilities.

Qualified immunity shields Cuomo from liability

Arbeeny had sued Cuomo and his then-health commissioner Howard Zucker under a federal law covering deprivation of rights and a state wrongful death statute. A district court dismissed the suit on qualified immunity grounds, and the Manhattan-based Second Circuit Court of Appeals left that ruling intact. The Supreme Court's refusal to take the case means those lower court decisions stand.

Cuomo's spokesman Rich Azzopardi wasted no time framing the outcome as vindication. He told Fox News Digital on Tuesday:

"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 that the policy "aligned with actions taken on Democratic and Republican states across the country during a once-in-a-century pandemic." He called the facts "settled" and said "the highest court has spoken."

That framing deserves scrutiny. The Supreme Court's decision not to hear a case is not a ruling on the merits. It does not mean the justices examined the evidence and concluded Cuomo did nothing wrong. It means, for whatever reason, the court chose not to take it up. Azzopardi's characterization treats a procedural outcome as a substantive endorsement, a familiar move from political operatives on both sides of the aisle, but one that should not go unchallenged.

The court's refusal to revive the wrongful death claim follows a pattern in which qualified immunity has shielded public officials from civil liability even when the underlying policy decisions produced catastrophic outcomes.

The families left behind

Daniel Arbeeny told the New York Post on Tuesday that he was "disappointed" by the decision. But his fuller statement carried a sharper edge:

"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."

Arbeeny had previously told Fox News that his father's death was preventable, and that "the governor decided to lie about it." His brother Peter Arbeeny directed a message at Cuomo through the Brooklyn Paper: "You need to face us and apologize. If you are going to lead you are going to lead for all of us."

That last line carries particular weight given Cuomo's current political ambitions. As of late 2025, Cuomo was running for mayor of New York City. A photo caption in Fox News Digital's coverage placed him campaigning in New York on Monday, November 3, 2025. The nursing home issue has followed him onto the trail.

A bipartisan group, including Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, current Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Brooklyn state senator Zellnor Myrie, made the nursing home deaths a focal point and protested together to demand accountability from Cuomo. That kind of cross-party pressure is rare in New York politics and speaks to the depth of public anger over what happened in those facilities.

The numbers Cuomo's team doesn't want to discuss

Cuomo argued in court filings that his mandates were "clearly aimed" at freeing up hospital beds for "patients with more acute needs" and returning "individuals... who were no longer contagious back to facilities who could provide them with adequate care." The policy banned nursing homes from denying admission solely based on a COVID diagnosis.

Whatever the stated intent, the results were grim. Fox News obtained records from the New York Department of Health showing that Cuomo's administration reported 8,505 nursing home deaths through January 2021, but the actual figure topped 12,000. That gap between the official count and reality became one of the defining scandals of the pandemic era in New York.

The Supreme Court has been active on other fronts involving New York political disputes. In a separate case, the court halted a Democrat-led effort to redraw a Staten Island congressional district before the midterms, one of several recent interventions in the state's tangled political landscape.

A legal memo cited a New York State Department of Health report stating that the Cobble Hill nursing home where Norman Arbeeny was a patient had its first COVID-positive-testing patient admitted days after he was discharged. Cuomo's defenders have pointed to this timing as evidence that the policy did not directly cause Norman's death. The Arbeeny family sees it differently, and they are not alone.

Investigations that went nowhere

Azzopardi told Fox News Digital that independent reviews, including those from the Department of Justice, the New York County district attorney's office, and the New York State attorney general's office, found Cuomo's nursing home guidance "consistent with federal policy at the time." The New York County district attorney's office closed its 2022 probe into the nursing home deaths without bringing charges.

Not everyone accepted that outcome as legitimate. New York State Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Democrat from Flushing, said in a Fox & Friends interview after the probe closed that Cuomo's lawyers and "PR team" wanted the public to believe he had been "absolved." Fox News chief meteorologist Janice Dean, who lost both in-laws to COVID in New York nursing homes, suggested the closure pointed to a political "deal" between Albany and top prosecutors.

The pattern is worth noting. At every stage, the state investigation, the district attorney's probe, the district court, the appeals court, and now the Supreme Court, the system has declined to hold Cuomo personally accountable. Each time, his team has declared total vindication. Each time, the families have been told to move on.

Cuomo was hardly the only Democratic governor whose pandemic-era policies drew intense criticism. Pennsylvania's Tom Wolf and California's Gavin Newsom also faced scrutiny over lockdown procedures. But the New York nursing home scandal stood apart because of the scale of the death toll, the gap between reported and actual numbers, and the administration's documented efforts to minimize both.

Meanwhile, the court continues to shape the political terrain in other high-profile disputes. The justices recently agreed to hear a mail ballot deadline case that touches on election rules central to both parties' strategies, a reminder that the court's docket carries consequences far beyond any single denial of certiorari.

What the court's silence really means

Azzopardi's statement to Fox News Digital included a line that deserves to be read carefully: "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 implication, that the families' pursuit of legal accountability amounts to political manipulation, is a remarkable thing to say to people who buried parents and grandparents. Families who watched loved ones die in facilities that were ordered to accept contagious patients are not engaged in political theater. They are looking for answers that no court, prosecutor, or investigation has been willing to provide.

Republicans in New York have also pressed the issue at the federal level, and the broader GOP effort to use the courts to check Democratic power in the state has become a recurring feature of New York's political fights.

Qualified immunity exists for a reason. Public officials making urgent decisions in a crisis need some protection from hindsight lawsuits. But when the official count of the dead was off by more than 3,500, when the policy forced contagious patients into facilities housing the most vulnerable population in the country, and when every investigation ended without consequence, the doctrine starts to look less like a legal safeguard and more like a fortress built to protect the powerful from the people they failed.

Daniel Arbeeny said it plainly: "The Supreme Court doesn't erase what was done." He's right. No procedural ruling can undo what happened in New York's nursing homes. And no spokesman's victory lap changes the fact that more than 12,000 families are still waiting for someone in power to say the words that matter most: we got it wrong.

Courts can decline to hear a case. They cannot make the dead whole, or make the living forget who put them in harm's way.