The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a wrongful death lawsuit against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday, leaving in place lower-court rulings that shielded the Democrat from legal accountability for his administration's COVID-era policy of sending infected patients back into nursing homes. The decision effectively ends the legal road for a Brooklyn man who lost his 89-year-old father in 2020, and hands Cuomo's camp a talking point it wasted no time deploying.
Daniel Arbeeny sued Cuomo and then-health commissioner Howard Zucker under a federal law covering deprivation of rights and a state wrongful death statute. His father, Norman Arbeeny, died after being released from the Cobble Hill nursing home in Brooklyn, where COVID-positive patients had been housed under the governor's directive. A federal district judge dismissed the suit on qualified immunity grounds. The Manhattan-based Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that dismissal. And now the Supreme Court, without issuing a reason, has declined to take up the appeal.
Arbeeny has exhausted his options. The man who watched his father die under a policy he considers reckless has nowhere left to go in the federal courts.
Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi moved fast to frame the Supreme Court's pass as a final stamp of approval. He 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."
Azzopardi went further, arguing that Cuomo's nursing home guidance "aligned with actions taken on Democratic and Republican states across the country during a once-in-a-century pandemic." He cited 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.
That framing deserves scrutiny. A denial of certiorari is not an endorsement of the underlying policy. It is not a verdict. It is not an investigation. The Supreme Court simply chose not to hear the case, a procedural decision it makes routinely without comment. As we have noted before, a pass from the high court does not equal exoneration, no matter how aggressively a political operation spins it.
Azzopardi also struck a tone that families of the dead might find galling. He said 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 implication: the real problem was not the policy that sent COVID-positive patients into facilities full of elderly residents. The real problem was people talking about it.
Daniel Arbeeny did not accept the Cuomo camp's narrative. 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."
In earlier remarks to Fox News, Arbeeny said his father's death was preventable and that "the governor decided to lie about it." His brother, Peter Arbeeny, told the Brooklyn Paper that Cuomo owed families a direct reckoning.
"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 extra weight. Cuomo is now a New York City mayoral candidate, running in 2025 on a record that includes, whether he likes it or not, one of the deadliest policy decisions of the pandemic era. A bipartisan group including Republican mayoral nominee Curtis Sliwa, current Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Brooklyn State Sen. Zellnor Myrie made the nursing home issue a focal point during the campaign, protesting together to demand accountability.
When Republicans and Democrats in New York City agree that a policy deserves scrutiny, the policy probably deserves scrutiny.
The factual record around Cuomo's nursing home directive has never been clean. New York Department of Health records obtained by Fox News showed that through January 2021, Cuomo's administration reported 8,505 nursing home deaths. The actual figure topped 12,000. That gap, roughly 3,500 unreported deaths, did not surface by accident. It reflected a systematic undercount that shielded the administration from the full political weight of its own policy.
The broader pattern of institutional opacity in government is not unique to Albany, but the scale here was extraordinary. Families buried loved ones while the state published numbers that did not account for thousands of the dead.
Cuomo's camp argued in court filings that the mandates were aimed at freeing up hospital beds for "patients with more acute needs" and sending "individuals... who were no longer contagious back to facilities who could provide them with adequate care." That rationale may have sounded reasonable in the fog of early 2020. But the downstream consequences, thousands of elderly residents exposed, thousands dead, and a state government that misrepresented the toll, paint a different picture.
A legal memo cited a New York State Department of Health report stating that the Cobble Hill nursing home had its first COVID-positive-testing patient admitted days after Norman Arbeeny was discharged. Cuomo's defenders have pointed to this timeline to argue the policy did not directly cause Norman's death. The Arbeeny family sees it differently. And the broader question, whether the policy killed people at other facilities across the state, remains a matter of public record, not legal resolution.
The legal doctrine that saved Cuomo here is qualified immunity, the principle that government officials cannot be sued for actions taken in their official capacity unless they violated "clearly established" rights. It is a powerful shield, and in this case, it worked exactly as designed: it prevented a grieving family from holding a governor personally liable for a policy that sent sick people into buildings full of the most vulnerable.
The Supreme Court's handling of qualified immunity cases this term has drawn attention from across the political spectrum. The doctrine protects officials from all parties, in all kinds of disputes. But when it shields a governor from answering for a policy that contributed to thousands of deaths, and when that governor is now running for mayor, the public has a right to ask whether legal immunity and moral accountability are the same thing.
They are not.
The New York County District Attorney's office opened an investigation into the nursing home deaths and closed it in 2022 without charges. After that closure, New York State Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Democrat from Flushing, said on Fox & Friends 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 closure suggested a political "deal" between Albany and top prosecutors.
Cuomo was not the only Democratic governor who faced scrutiny over nursing home policies. Pennsylvania's Tom Wolf and California's Gavin Newsom came under intense criticism for similar lockdown procedures and policies requiring nursing homes to accept returning hospital patients regardless of coronavirus infection status. But New York's death toll, and the documented undercount, made Cuomo's record the most politically explosive.
The Supreme Court's docket this term has been packed with politically charged disputes. This particular denial may not have drawn the same attention as emergency appeals or headline-grabbing oral arguments. But for the families who buried parents and grandparents after the state sent infected patients into their care facilities, it is the final door closing.
The Supreme Court did not say Cuomo was right. It did not say his policy was sound. It did not review the merits of Daniel Arbeeny's claims. It simply declined to take the case. That is a procedural outcome, not a moral one.
Cuomo's spokesman declared that "the facts are settled and the highest court has spoken." But the highest court did not speak. It stayed silent. And silence, in this context, protects the status quo, which happens to be a pair of lower-court rulings built on qualified immunity, not on a finding that the policy was wise or that the death toll was acceptable.
Daniel Arbeeny said his father's death was preventable. More than 12,000 New Yorkers died in nursing homes while the state reported fewer than 8,505. The governor who signed the order is now asking voters to trust him with City Hall.
Courts can grant immunity. Voters don't have to.
