The U.S. District Court for Wyoming must reconsider a 2021 lawsuit it dismissed from a Laramie High School student arrested during a mask-mandate dispute, an appeals panel ruled Tuesday in Denver.
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals sent Grace Smith’s case back to Wyoming with instructions to revise the dismissal ruling based on the appeals panel’s findings.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Freudenthal dismissed Smith’s suit last year saying she and her parents lacked standing and failed to state a claim that merited relief. Smith, a junior at the time of the dispute, filed the action with her parents against Albany County School District No. 1 Board of Trustees, the district’s superintendent and the high school principal.
The Smiths claimed free speech and due process violations under the U.S. Constitution and violations of Wyoming law. The case, originally filed in Wyoming District Court, was moved to the federal level where the subsequent decisions did not address the Wyoming claims.
“When a government regulation ‘require[s] or forbid[s] some action by the plaintiff,’ she ‘almost invariably’ states an injury in fact.”
U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals
Freudenthal noted that Smith had withdrawn from school, that the mask mandate had expired and therefore she suffered no actual or imminent injury. Instead, any distress was “conjectural or hypothetical,” according to Freudenthal’s ruling.
Freudenthal dismissed the suit saying Smith’s injury was “self-inflicted,” noting she trespassed voluntarily during a protest, opted out of a virtual education offered to non-mask wearers and left school altogether, according to court documents.
That didn’t sit well with the appeals panel in Denver. “We are not persuaded,” the three judges wrote.
“When a government regulation ‘require[s] or forbid[s] some action by the plaintiff,’ she ‘almost invariably’ states an injury in fact,” they wrote. “They suspended [Smith] three times and requested that local law enforcement issue her two trespassing citations, arrest her, and take her to jail.
“These allegations state an injury in fact,” the appeals panel wrote.
The panel also noted that the other option given to Smith — virtual classes — may have been adequate for educational purposes, but was a far cry from being equivalent to in-person instruction.
The Smiths’ original suit, filed in Wyoming District Court in Albany County, sought direct, consequential and punitive damages, meaning the family seeks financial redress as well as punishment of the school board, its members and the administrators.
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