The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a wrongful death lawsuit against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, ending the legal fight of a Brooklyn man who blamed Cuomo's COVID-era nursing home orders for his father's death in 2020. The justices gave no reason for their decision, standard practice, and left lower court rulings intact.
The case, brought by Daniel Arbeeny, alleged that Cuomo's directive barring nursing homes from denying admission based on a COVID diagnosis sent thousands of infected patients into facilities housing the most vulnerable. Arbeeny's father, Norman, died at 89 after being released from a Cobble Hill nursing home where COVID patients had been housed.
For the Arbeeny family and thousands of others who lost elderly relatives in New York nursing homes during the pandemic, the Court's refusal to act marks the end of a legal road, but not the end of the questions that Cuomo's administration has never fully answered.
Arbeeny sued Cuomo and 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. The Manhattan-based Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that dismissal. As the New York Post reported, the Supreme Court's denial exhausted Arbeeny's appeal options entirely.
Qualified immunity, the doctrine that shields government officials from civil liability when their conduct does not violate "clearly established" rights, has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum. In this case, it meant that even if Cuomo's policy contributed to nursing home deaths, the legal system treated the question as settled before any jury could weigh the evidence.
Cuomo's camp wasted no time claiming vindication. 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."
Azzopardi added that Cuomo's guidance "aligned with actions taken on Democratic and Republican states across the country during a once-in-a-century pandemic." He declared: "The facts are settled and the highest court has spoken."
That framing deserves scrutiny. The Supreme Court did not examine the merits of the case. It simply declined to hear it. A refusal to grant certiorari is not a ruling on the facts. It is not an exoneration. And it is not an endorsement of Cuomo's pandemic decision-making. Azzopardi's language conflates procedural dismissal with substantive vindication, a distinction that matters greatly to the families who buried loved ones.
The Supreme Court's procedural decision does nothing to resolve one of the most damaging revelations of the pandemic era: Cuomo's administration systematically undercounted nursing home deaths. 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 gap, roughly 3,500 deaths unaccounted for in official reporting, was not a rounding error. It was a pattern of disclosure that left families, lawmakers, and the public working from false numbers during a crisis. The Court's high-profile term has produced no shortage of consequential decisions, including a recent ruling tossing an appellate decision in the Steve Bannon contempt case, but in this instance the justices chose silence.
Daniel Arbeeny said he was "disappointed" by the decision but refused to treat it as the final word. In comments to the New York Post on Tuesday, he stated:
"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 was blunter about the cover-up: "the governor decided to lie about it."
Court documents from the Second Circuit described the rationale behind Cuomo's March 2020 directive. Cuomo argued in filings that the mandates aimed to assuage fears that COVID hospitalizations would overwhelm capacity and to free up hospital beds for "patients with more acute needs." The policy was framed as returning "individuals... who were no longer contagious back to facilities who could provide them with adequate care."
But the lived reality was grimmer. The Cobble Hill nursing home where Norman Arbeeny had been housed became a flashpoint. A New York State Department of Health report cited in a legal memo stated the facility had its first COVID-positive-testing patient admitted days after Norman Arbeeny was discharged. The timeline raises hard questions about what the administration knew, when it knew it, and whether the "no longer contagious" standard was applied with any rigor.
Cuomo was hardly the only governor whose pandemic nursing home policies drew fire. Democratic governors Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania and Gavin Newsom of California also came under scrutiny for lockdown procedures and nursing home decisions. But New York's death toll, and the administration's documented undercount, placed Cuomo in a category of his own.
The nursing home issue followed Cuomo into his 2025 New York City mayoral campaign. A bipartisan group, including Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, current Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Brooklyn state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, made the issue a focal point and protested together to demand accountability. The Supreme Court's current term has drawn intense attention on multiple fronts, but for these families, this particular case carried the most personal weight.
Peter Arbeeny, Norman's other son, 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."
That plea has gone unanswered. Instead, Azzopardi's statement on Tuesday opened by acknowledging families' pain, then pivoted immediately to declaring the matter closed. He said 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 suggestion that grieving families were "manipulated" will land poorly with anyone who watched the Cuomo administration report 8,505 deaths while the real number exceeded 12,000. If anyone's pain was manipulated, it was by the officials who controlled the data.
Azzopardi pointed to reviews by the Department of Justice, the New York State attorney general's office, and the New York County district attorney's office as evidence of Cuomo's innocence. The district attorney's office closed its 2022 probe into the nursing home deaths without bringing charges. But not everyone found that outcome persuasive.
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, said the closed probe suggested a political "deal" between Albany and top prosecutors. The broader pattern of high-stakes deliberations behind closed doors at every level of government has left many Americans skeptical of official conclusions.
The distinction matters. A prosecutor declining to bring charges is not the same as a finding of innocence. A court granting qualified immunity is not the same as a court ruling that no harm was done. And the Supreme Court declining to hear a case is not the same as the Supreme Court endorsing the outcome below.
Cuomo's team has spent years collapsing these distinctions into a single talking point: he was cleared. The actual record is more complicated. Multiple investigations closed without charges, yes, but the death undercount remains documented, the policy's consequences remain real, and no official has ever been held personally accountable for either.
The Supreme Court's refusal to take the case does not set legal precedent. It does not validate Cuomo's nursing home directive. It does not address the 3,500-death gap in the state's own reporting. It simply means that Daniel Arbeeny has no further legal recourse against the man he holds responsible for his father's death.
For Cuomo, now a mayoral candidate, the decision removes a legal cloud at a politically convenient moment. For the Arbeeny family and thousands like them, it confirms what they have suspected for years: that the system protects officials who make catastrophic decisions during a crisis, even when those officials then misrepresent the results. In a term where the Court has weighed in on emergency appeals and sweeping constitutional questions, it chose to say nothing here.
Norman Arbeeny was 89 years old. He died in 2020, in a state that sent COVID-positive patients into his nursing home and then lied about how many people that policy helped put in the ground. No court has held anyone responsible. That is not vindication. That is a system that failed the people it was supposed to protect.
