Federal court rejects appeal in dance studios' COVID-19 lawsuit

A federal appeals court has dismissed an appeal by 15 dance studios that sued the state of Ohio, multiple health officials and health departments last year after they were declared "nonessential" businesses and forced to close during the opening months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Senior Judge Danny Boggs and Judges Karen Moore and Richard Griffin of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled against the dance studios and their owners in a decision handed down Monday. The judges found that U.S. District Judge James Carr rightly dismissed the lawsuit and its claims as meritless in a 36-page decision in October 2021. The appellate judges agreed with his decision that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue and weren't eligible for monetary damages, according to court records. The dance studio owners sued the state, Gov. Mike DeWine, former Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton, her two successors, former Lorain County Health Commissioner David Covell, and the commissioners of 13 other Ohio health departments in March 2021. The plaintiffs included Miss Darcy's Academy of Dance and Art in Sheffield and dance studios in Hudson, Milan, Eastlake, Middleburg Heights, North Canton, Toledo, Worthington, Upper Arlington, Columbus, Gahanna, Cincinnati and Middletown. They were represented by Robert Gargasz, an attorney and former Republican candidate for Lorain County prosecutor, and co-counsel Thomas Renz, a vocal critic of both the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines. The plaintiffs disputed the state's mandates and "that any real emergency actually existed especially in light of the fact that this disease has a substantially lower fatality rate and at the same time a similar rate of spread as many other diseases." They likewise argued that COVID-19 "can now be shown to be roughly as dangerous as the yearly flu." Carr dismissed the lawsuit in October 2021, calling the plaintiffs' complaints "as hapless as they were hopeless." He wrote that the plaintiffs didn't have the standing to sue, that they failed to meet a burden to show "that the harmful actions were traceable to any defendants except for" Acton, and that the doctrine of qualified immunity prevented them from seeking monetary damages. "Finally, the court criticized the plaintiffs for filing what was, in its view, a frivolous brief," the appeals court wrote. Attorneys for the defendants have requested Carr sanction Gargasz and Renz for failing "to correct, amend or withdraw that complaint when they plainly knew its irredeemable deficiencies." That issue still is pending before Carr, according to federal court records. Worldwide, there have been more than 593 million confirmed cases and 6,446,547 deaths from COVID-19, according to the World Health Organization. The WHO has reported 92.1 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 1,028,619 deaths from the disease in just the United States, about one-sixth of the world's total.