The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a wrongful death lawsuit against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, leaving a Brooklyn family without legal recourse five years after their 89-year-old father died in a nursing home where COVID-positive patients were housed under the Democrat’s pandemic-era mandate.
The high court offered no explanation for its decision, as Fox News Digital reported Tuesday. A district court had previously dismissed the suit on qualified immunity grounds, and the Supreme Court’s refusal to take up the appeal ends the legal road for plaintiff Daniel Arbeeny, who sued Cuomo and then-health commissioner Howard Zucker under a federal deprivation-of-rights statute and a state wrongful death law.
Cuomo’s camp wasted no time claiming vindication. His longtime spokesman Rich Azzopardi 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. The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear a case is not a ruling on its merits. It is not an acquittal. It is not a finding of fact. It is a procedural gate that stays shut, and it leaves thousands of grieving families right where they started.
At the core of this case is a policy that became one of the most controversial executive decisions of the entire pandemic. Cuomo’s administration ordered nursing homes to accept returning hospital patients regardless of their coronavirus infection status. The stated purpose, laid out in court filings, was to free up hospital beds for “patients with more acute needs” and to send “individuals… who were no longer contagious back to facilities who could provide them with adequate care.”
The policy effectively banned nursing homes from denying admission solely based on a COVID diagnosis. That directive sent infected patients back into the most vulnerable population centers in the state, long-term care facilities filled with elderly residents who had no ability to isolate themselves from new arrivals.
Norman Arbeeny, Daniel’s father, died at 89 after being released from a Cobble Hill nursing home where COVID patients were housed. A New York State Department of Health report cited in a legal memo stated that the Cobble Hill facility had its first COVID-positive-testing patient admitted days after Norman Arbeeny was discharged, a detail that complicates any clean narrative about what exposure he faced and when.
The Supreme Court has been active this term in cases with major political consequences, but its silence here speaks volumes to families who believed they would get their day before the justices.
Azzopardi insisted that the nursing home guidance “aligned with actions taken on Democratic and Republican states across the country during a once-in-a-century pandemic.” He pointed to independent reviews from the DOJ, the New York County district attorney’s office, and the New York State attorney general’s office as having found the guidance consistent with federal policy at the time.
What Azzopardi did not address is the gap between what Cuomo’s administration reported and what actually happened. New York Department of Health records obtained by Fox News showed that Cuomo reported 8,505 nursing home deaths through January 2021. The actual figure topped 12,000.
That is not a rounding error. That is a discrepancy of more than 3,500 deaths, roughly 41 percent higher than the number the governor’s team put before the public. And it is the kind of gap that fuels the anger families like the Arbeenys carry to this day.
Daniel Arbeeny told the New York Post he was “disappointed” by the court’s 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.”
He added that “the governor decided to lie about it.”
The New York County District Attorney’s office opened and then closed its probe into the nursing home deaths in 2022. That closure drew sharp criticism at the time. 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 the former governor 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’s closure suggested a political “deal” between Albany and top prosecutors. Whether or not that characterization is fair, the pattern is hard to miss: every institutional check, the DA’s office, the attorney general, the DOJ, and now the Supreme Court, has declined to hold Cuomo accountable in any formal proceeding.
The question for families is whether that pattern reflects genuine innocence or a system that simply lacks the mechanism to deliver accountability when a governor makes a catastrophic policy call during a crisis. Qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that shielded Cuomo in the lower courts, exists to protect officials from personal liability when they make decisions in the course of their duties. It was not designed to tell families that what happened to them didn’t matter.
The high court’s role in politically charged disputes has drawn intense public attention in recent terms, and this latest refusal will do nothing to quiet the debate.
Cuomo was not just a former governor when this case reached the Supreme Court. He was running for mayor of New York City in 2025. The nursing home issue became a focal point of his campaign, not because Cuomo raised it, but because his opponents and the families of the dead would not let it go.
A bipartisan group that included Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, current Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Brooklyn State Sen. Zellnor Myrie protested together to demand accountability. That kind of cross-party unity on any issue in New York politics is rare. On this one, it was driven by something more basic than partisanship: grief and a sense that no one in power had ever answered for what happened.
Norman Arbeeny’s other son, Peter, told the Brooklyn Paper what he wanted from Cuomo directly:
“You need to face us and apologize. If you are going to lead you are going to lead for all of us.”
Cuomo was one of several Democratic COVID-era governors, including Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf and California’s Gavin Newsom, who came under scrutiny for lockdown procedures and policies that required nursing homes to accept returning hospital patients. But New York’s case stood apart because of the sheer scale of the death toll and the documented gap between reported and actual fatality numbers.
The aftermath of Supreme Court decisions often reshapes political fights in ways the justices themselves may not intend, and this case is no exception.
Azzopardi closed his statement with a line meant to shut the door: “The facts are settled and the highest court has spoken.” But the highest court did not speak. It stayed silent. It issued no opinion, no reasoning, no engagement with the facts at all. It simply declined to take the case.
That is Cuomo’s right to celebrate, legally. But it is not absolution. And for a man seeking the trust of New York City voters, the distinction matters. More than 12,000 people died in nursing homes. The governor’s office reported a number roughly 3,500 lower. The families sued, and the courts told them the governor was immune.
In a legal system built on accountability, there are moments when every door closes and no one is ever held responsible. The courts have shown they can act decisively when they choose to. For the Arbeeny family and thousands like them, this was not one of those moments.
Qualified immunity may protect a governor from a lawsuit. It does not protect him from the record.
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