A federal district judge in New York dismissed a civil case against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and members of his administration, finding that families who lost loved ones to COVID-19 in nursing homes during the pandemic do not have a federal right to sue. 

Judge Katherine Polk Failla, appointed to the federal bench by former President Barack Obama in 2012, argued in her opinion published Monday that the plaintiffs in the case did not have a federal right to sue Cuomo and several others in his administration in civil court for monetary damages.

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The eight plaintiffs in the case argued that their loved ones contracted COVID-19 in nursing homes in the Empire State because of a March 25, 2020, directive from Cuomo and his team prohibiting nursing homes from refusing admittance to patients with the infection. 

Nowhere in Failla’s opinion does she deny the accusation that the Cuomo administration’s nursing home decision was to blame for the deaths of thousands of nursing home residents in the first year of the pandemic. But the plaintiffs, Failla said, only presented a weak case for a federal redress.

“The Court’s sympathy for Plaintiffs and their loved ones simply cannot supplant governing law,” wrote Failla. 

Among a host of technical legal problems in the complicated case, Failla contends that the plaintiffs’ argument did not meet the high bar of shocking the public conscience, even if it was negligent. 

The opinion highlights the similarity between this case and New York officials’ mismanagement of environmental dangers related to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which required public officials “to make decisions using rapidly changing information about the ramifications of unprecedented events.” 

Failla argued that the conscience-shocking exception to the right to sue state actors in a federal court is a high standard that allows public officials to make reasonable mistakes under exigent circumstances.

Cuomo announced earlier this month his plan to run for New York City mayor to reboot his political career after being in exile due to both the COVID-19 scandal and a barrage of sexual harassment allegations.

Since his 2021 resignation, Cuomo’s gubernatorial administration has faced several state and federal investigations for its handling of COVID-19 nursing home patients and the following underreporting of the number of nursing home residents who died as a result of the infectious disease. 

Initial drafts of a report investigating the March 25 directive from the New York State Department of Health claimed that fewer than 10,000 nursing home residents died of COVID-19. 

Subsequent evidence first uncovered by state Attorney General Letitia James found that there may have been as many as 15,000 deaths connected to the nursing home policy and that the real figures were suppressed by Cuomo’s office in the final version of the Health Department report.

“Anytime this issue gets taken out of the press or the political arena and into the courts, the truth wins,” Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi said in a statement, adding that “justice has prevailed” in Monday’s dismissal of the civil case. 

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Last October, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic recommended criminal charges against Cuomo, saying he lied during the House investigations into nursing home fatalities in New York. 

The subcommittee also accused Cuomo of intimidating a key witness before the subcommittee. At the time, Azzopardi told the Washington Examiner that the accusation was part of the panel’s “history of misrepresenting the truth and lying to the press.”