Carlisle residents who were big mad about face masks in 2021 still big mad, hope Supreme Court will listen to them when other courts told them to go away

A group of residents in the Concord suburb of Carlisle are hoping the Supreme Court can deliver the righteous retribution they feel their hamlet deserves for daring to require people to wear masks when entering the town library or other public indoor spaces for a few months at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Rebuffed by both a federal judge and a federal appeals court, both of whom said the masking requirement was a responsible reaction to a fast-spreading, deadly pandemic, the residents asked the nation's highest court to rule otherwise. The court put the case on its docket this week, which means it will consider whether to hear arguments in the case, not that it will actually do so.

The then dozen residents, now down to seven, filed their pro se suit in US District Court in Boston on Nov. 4, 2021 against town employees and officials, including the town health agent and the town library director, because of the way the library barred maskless patrons and then how the board of health decided in August, 2021 to bar the unmasked in all public spaces in town - with an exception for people who could prove a medical objection.

Citing what they claimed were state, federal and UN regulations and a Wall Street Journal article, the residents' complaint blasted this as a blatant violation of their right to bare faces, that the board of health had no authority at all to require masks. And that even if it did, they argued, Covid-19 was hardly that severe of a public-health threat to warrant violating their basic human rights, let alone to have the library discriminate against them in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, because the library policy made no mention of medical exceptions.

And, the residents continued, in their mad zeal to suppress the virus "at all costs," town functionaries had actually worsened public health and were subjecting innocent townfolk to "uninformed medical experimentation without disclosing known harms."

In September, 2022, US District Court Judge Allison Burroughs agreed with the town to dismiss the case.

Boards of health in Massachusetts do so have the right to enact emergency public-health regulations, especially given that the governor had himself issued an emergency declaration on the topic, Burroughs wrote - noting also a 1905 Supreme Court decision involving a Cambridge minister who didn't want his sons vaccinated against smallpox during an outbreak, which gave states the right to declare public-health emergencies. Covid-19 not that serious? Please, she concluded, if with a bit more legal verbiage.

Defendants responsibly relied on guidance from state and federal officials, including "overwhelming medical evidence" regarding the utility of face masks in reducing the spread of COVID-19. ... Nothing in the record suggests that Defendants' actions, whether it be the BOH mask mandate or the Library mask mandate, were unreasonable or unsupported. The fact that there was only one reported COVID-19-related death in Carlisle around the time the mandate was implemented does not alter this conclusion, where the BOH was being confronted with state data reporting an uptick in breakthrough cases and increased hospitalizations due to the Delta variant, even in places with high vaccination rates.

Even aside from the fact the board of health rescinded the requirement on Feb. 23, 2022, making their case moot, and the fact that the board of health had the right to require masking, the residents might not have had "standing" to sue over damages they supposedly suffered, since only one of them claimed to have actually tried to enter the library maskless and was asked to put one on, she wrote in her ruling, which uses many of the same legal arguments as those of another federal judge who dismissed a similar case against Boston's indoor masking requirement.

Burroughs also dismissed their Constitutional arguments, such as that the measure violated their First Amendment freedom to assemble and their right to due process.

Plaintiffs have not demonstrated that the mask mandates implicated a fundamental right or were an irrational response to COVID-19.

The residents appealed, but in a much shorter opinion on April 18 of this year, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston upheld Burroughs' ruling, saying it fully concurred with Burroughs and that:

To the extent that intervening caselaw may have strengthened the claim for damages from the Board's rescinded mandate, that possibility (concerning which we express no opinion) only underscores the fact that no clearly established Constitutional right was violated by appellees during the period in question.

Undeterred, earlier this month, the residents filed a petition with the Supreme Court asking it to hear the case.