Court revives anti-masking student’s lawsuit over COVID-era arrest and suspension from high school

A judge ruled that a lawsuit filed on behalf of a Wyoming woman who refused to comply with her former high school’s mask mandate in 2021 can proceed.

Grace Smith was 16 years old and a junior at Laramie High School when she was arrested for trespassing. Out of protest against the school’s mask mandate during the COVID-19 pandemic, Smith refused to take virtual classes and showed up to her school without a mask, which was required in order to attend in-person classes. She was suspended from school three times for refusing to comply with the mandate.

When she tried once again to attend classes in person without a mask, she was arrested for trespassing and booked. Her father Andy Smith accompanied her to school and videotaped her arrest, posting the video online for everyone to see.

Grace Smith later withdrew from the school.

Smith’s parents sued Laramie High School on behalf of their daughter for the arrest, claiming that her First Amendment rights had been violated and that the school engaged in retaliation against her for not complying with the mandate.

As the case made its way through the courts, it was eventually dismissed by Senior U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Freudenthal, a Barack Obama appointee, in 2023. She ruled at the time that Smith did not have standing because she could not prove that the harm done to her was not “self-inflicted.”

Smith’s parents appealed — successfully.

“We are not persuaded,” a three-judge panel for the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in an order issued Tuesday.

The judges — Obama appointee Harris Hartz, George W. Bush appointee Gregory Phillips, and Donald Trump appointee Allison Eid — found that Smith did have standing.

“[W]hen a government regulation ‘require[s] or forbid[s] some action by the plaintiff,’ she ‘almost invariably’ states an injury in fact,” the judges wrote. “She alleges that the defendants repeatedly punished her for opposing the mask mandate. They suspended her 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.”

These actions by the school against Smith showed that the former student “easily met the requirements for standing,” the judges found. They further found the school’s counterarguments “unpersuasive.”

Noting that they were not asked to address the merits of the case, the judges wrote that the school’s position “put the ‘merits cart before the standing horse.’”

“[A]s explained above, [the merits are] not relevant to her standing to bring the claims,” the judges wrote. “And to the extent that the defendants are saying that the mandate, even if unconstitutional, did not cause her injuries because she could have avoided the injuries by obeying the mandate, they miss the mark.”

In short, the judges concluded, “Grace’s injuries were ‘directly inflicted’ by the defendants’ enforcement of the mask mandate.”

The case was remanded back to U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming.

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