The highest court in North Carolina has waved the green flag with a lawsuit that the owners of ACE Speedway initially lodged four years ago over the state’s allegedly selective enforcement of pandemic-era limits on gatherings.
In a unanimous ruling on Friday, the highest court in North Carolina agreed to let Robert and Jason Turner proceed with the civil case that they first filed in 2020 after the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services ordered them to halt the operations of their Altamahaw race track.
The department originally took action against the father-son pair in the spring of 2020 after ACE held several well attended races in violation of the crowd-size restrictions that the governor had promulgated at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. A local superior court judge went on to uphold the department’s abatement order against ACE, which the speedway’s owners went on to appeal. In the meantime, the Turners lodged their own legal complaint against the state in which they claimed that they had been singled out for enforcement due to their vocal objections to the state’s restrictions on mass gatherings.
The department of health and human services eventually dropped its case against ACE after Governor Roy Cooper loosened the limits on crowd sizes in the fall of 2020. The Turners nevertheless chose to move ahead with their counterclaim, and in January of 2021, a visiting superior court judge agreed to let the case move forward notwithstanding the state’s motion for its dismissal based on its claim of “sovereign immunity.”
The state appealed the trial court’s ruling, only to have it unanimously upheld in 2022 by a three-judge panel with the N.C. Court of Appeals. The state appealed this ruling as well, which led to a hearing before the state’s supreme court in November of 2023.
In Friday’s decision, associate justice Richard Dietz contends that the trial court judge had acted correctly in choosing to let the lawsuit proceed in spite of the state’s opposition.
Dietz points out that the Turners have accused the state of violating their constitutional rights on two scores – first by depriving them of their livelihood through its pandemic-era restrictions and, secondly, by enforcing these rules differently against them than other racing venues. Dietz adds that, if taken at face value, these allegations would constitute violations of North Carolina’s state constitution and would negate the state’s claims of sovereign immunity. Yet, the trial court would have needed to hear the facts of the case to determine whether these allegations are, in fact, true. The judge had, therefore, acted correctly in rejecting the state’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
“As we have repeated throughout this option, ACE Speedway’s allegations remain unproven. The case has barely begun,” Dietz goes on to assert on behalf of the court. “The trial court correctly concluded that the claims are [legally] valid and therefore the state’s motion to dismiss must be denied.”
