Justices of the US Supreme Court pose for their official photo at the Supreme Court in Washington, DC on November 30, 2018.
Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images
Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch on Wednesday denied that their relationship has been frayed over a disagreement about wearing masks as a Covid-19 safety measure during in-person court proceedings.
The rare joint statement from the two sitting justices came one day after an NPR report said that Gorsuch refused to wear a mask, despite a request from Chief Justice John Roberts for all nine members of the bench to do so.
The statement did not address the key question of whether Roberts had asked the justices to wear masks. It denied that Sotomayor herself had asked Gorsuch to wear a mask, which is not what NPR reported.
An NPR spokesman told CNBC that the outlet stands by its report, noting that veteran Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg “never reported that Justice Sotomayor asked Justice Gorsuch to wear a mask, nor did she report that anyone admonished him.”
“The statement released by Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch does not contradict the reporting in Totenberg’s piece,” NPR said.
A Supreme Court spokesperson, who shared the statement with CNBC, did not immediately respond to a question about the apparent discrepancy between NPR’s reporting and the statement from Gorsuch and Sotomayor.
Gorsuch’s refusal to wear a mask during oral arguments, and reportedly during the justices’ weekly conferences as well, led Sotomayor to participate in those events remotely, according to Totenberg.
Roberts “in some form” had asked the other justices to wear masks after Sotomayor — who has diabetes and is therefore at a higher risk of serious illness from Covid — felt unsafe sitting next to unmasked people amid the surge of the highly transmissible omicron variant, NPR reported, citing court sources.
The statement Wednesday from Gorsuch and Sotomayor does not mention Roberts. Rather, it says the two justices were “surprised” by “reporting that Justice Sotomayor asked Justice Gorsuch to wear a mask.”
“It is false,” the two justices said in the statement, before reaffirming their cordial working relationship. “While we may sometimes disagree about the law, we are warm colleagues and friends,” they said.
All nine justices are vaccinated against Covid and all have received booster shots.
