Do a Governor’s emergency powers supersede citizens’ constitutional rights?

This is one issue that will likely be adjudicated, as The Ocean State Current has learned that Dr. Stephen Skoly has filed a brief for his appeal in the US First Circuit Court on Wednesday.

Click here to read the brief its entirety

This past August, Skoly’s attorney, Gregory Piccirilli, filed for the appeal after Rhode Island’s Federal District Court Judge,  Mary McElroy, in July issued a “bench ruling” granting the motion by the attorneys for the State of Rhode Island to dismiss Skoly’s vaccine mandate lawsuit on the basis that it was moot.

Skoly’s legal team was prepared to submit overwhelming medical and public corruption evidence in support of the lawsuit to counter the original claims about the Covid vaccine,  since Skoly’s original lawsuit was filed in February of 2022 against the State of Rhode Island, the RI Department of Health, Governor Dan McKee and current and former health directors Nicole Alexander Scott, James McDonald, and Utpala Bandy, as well as Matthew Weldon of the RI Department of Labor & Training.

Judge McElroy, however, in issuing her ruling, refused to allow discovery or hearings to consider this ample evidence, which Skoly and his team were confident would win the day … if they could only get their day in court. Now they are petitioning a federal circuit appeals court to give their case a fair hearing.

According to Skoly’s recollection when speaking with The Current at length last month, at the Rhode Island proceedings, one of the state attorneys cavalierly and cuttingly stated, to the effect, that Dr. Skoly “proudly” defied the healthcare worker vaccine mandate issued by the RI Department of Health, clearly implying that he was deserving of the 6-month shuttering of his oral and maxillofacial surgical practice. Skoly was the only medical practitioner shut down by RIDOH.

Alarmingly, and perhaps the basis for this Circuit Court appeal, was a purported statement by Judge McElroy that the government’s statutory emergency powers superseded Skoly’s Constitutional rights. However, Robert Flanders, former Associate Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court, told The Current last year that “there is no pandemic exception to the US Constitution.”

Skoly’s current legal team, headed by Ocean State attorney Piccirilli, also includes attorneys from the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which served as lead in the Rhode Island District Court proceedings. The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, located in Boston, hears appeals from the United States District Courts for the Districts of Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Puerto Rico and Rhode Island.

Skoly filed his original lawsuit on the basis that he had a relatively rare medical condition that his doctors feared might be exacerbated by the Covid-19 vaccine. As Chairman of the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, Skoly also contended in his complaint that his constitutional rights had been infringed upon.