Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor of New York, caught a few big breaks this week. First, the Albany district attorney announced that he could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Cuomo had broken the law when he groped an aide in 2020. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, meanwhile, apparently told Cuomo’s lawyers they had closed its investigation into how Cuomo handled COVID-19 in nursing homes.

The Albany announcement pointed to one sobering reality: Cuomo egregiously harassed women but won’t be held accountable in the court of law, in part because the burden of proof, in these cases, can be quite high. It’s also far easier for a district attorney to square up against a no-name defendant than the wealthy former governor, with high-powered attorneys prepared to duel it out at a trial. DA’s hate to lose.

The nursing home issue never attracted as much attention as Cuomo’s predatory behavior toward women and was ultimately not what drove him from office. But it was, in its own way, disturbing and destructive. In a bid to boost his own profile and possibly make himself look better in the pandemic memoir he published last year, Cuomo intentionally downplayed the deaths in nursing homes, creating bizarre criteria for counting them where infected residents who happened to die in hospitals weren’t accounted for at all.