Anti-mask lawsuit struggles to breathe
The lawsuit attacked Wyoming school districts that required students to mask. The suit was dismissed for a second time when plaintiffs missed a key deadline.
A conspiratorial, misinformation-laden lawsuit brought by anti-mask parents across Wyoming has been dismissed for what appears to be the final time.
The lawsuit took aim at school districts across Wyoming, county health officers, state health officials, and even Gov. Mark Gordon — alleging that those individuals and entities exaggerated the threat posed by COVID-19 in a plot to institute greater government control over the population.
The plaintiffs wanted the court to declare that mandatory vaccines, masking, and even social distancing were unconstitutional. COVID-19 vaccines have never been mandated for students in Wyoming and every mask mandate in Wyoming school districts has been lifted.
The lawsuit was originally filed as a 128-page complaint replete with grammatical errors, sentence fragments and factual inaccuracies. It opened with a quote from C.S. Lewis and frequently cited right-wing blogs. It freely used words like “communist” and “totalitarian” while denigrating both the health statistics demonstrating COVID-19’s spread and the science demonstrating the effectiveness of vaccines. U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Freudenthal called the original complaint “a confused jumble” in an earlier dismissal order.
Following the original dismissal of most of the lawsuit’s named defendants, the parents bringing the suit filed an amended complaint. The amended complaint was just 15 pages long and was stripped of most, but not all, of its conspiracizing.
In the four months since the lawsuit was first filed, the Wyoming Department of Health announced 567 COVID-19 related deaths and the state’s official death toll rose to 1,741.
Grace Smith, the Laramie High School student who led a brief but national campaign against Albany County Schools’ mask mandate, was originally listed as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, alongside her father, Andy Smith.
The Smiths were not listed as plaintiffs in the amended 15-page complaint.
Albany County School District No. 1 and Superintendent Jubal Yennie were named as defendants in both versions of the suit, and dismissed from each.
They, like many of the defendants, were dismissed from the 128-page complaint when Judge Freudenthal ruled that it had failed to state its aims clearly. They, again like many of the defendants, requested dismissal from the new 15-page complaint soon after it was filed, and were dismissed when the plaintiffs failed to respond in a timely manner.
The plaintiffs, represented by Nick Beduhn, repeatedly missed deadlines throughout the entire court process.
“When Plaintiffs failed to timely respond to the motions to dismiss the first amended complaint, the Court put Plaintiffs on notice that if they again failed to timely respond to any motions, the Court would not hesitate to deem such motions confessed,” Freudenthal’s order states. “ … their culpability would seem high.”
Albany County Schools, as well as the other school districts named by the lawsuit, had the claims against them dismissed without prejudice. “Without prejudice” means that the claims could be brought again.
It appears that several of the defendants named by the lawsuit, including Gov. Mark Gordon, might not have been served, and Freudenthal announced an imminent dismissal for those defendants as well.
“Governor Gordon and the county health officers have been named as defendants since Plaintiffs filed the original complaint on November 2, 2021,” the new dismissal states. “The 90-day deadline for service to them passed on January 31, 2022. If Plaintiffs do not file a return or waiver of service as to each of those Defendants by March 7, 2022, the claims against them will be dismissed without prejudice without further notice.”