Florida’s strict liability rule can sound simple: the owner pays when a dog bites. In real life, it is easy for victims to get pushed into delays, low offers, or unfair blame. Knowing what ‘strict’ covers helps you protect your health and your claim. 

It also helps you speak clearly to doctors, insurers, and witnesses, and keeps you from accepting blame in a conversation that feels casual but gets recorded. Here are five ways Florida’s strict liability rule works. 

1.Strict liability focuses on the bite, not the dog’s past

Under Florida dog bite laws, the owner can be responsible even if the dog has never bitten anyone before. You usually do not have to prove the owner knew the dog was dangerous. The case often turns on whether a bite happened and whether you were lawfully on the property. Be sure to take photos of the wound, the scene, and any torn clothing.

2.Whether you had permission to be on the property is crucial

Strict liability hinges on where you were and why you were there. If you were in a public place, the rule is straightforward. If you were on private property, your right to be there matters. 

Guests, delivery workers, and people doing business usually qualify. Trespassing arguments can derail claims, so write down why you were there, who invited you, and the time.

3.Warning signs and shared fault can shrink or erase what you recover

Florida’s dog bite statute has a “Bad Dog” sign carveout for the owner’s property, with exceptions for children under six years and for cases tied to the owner’s negligence. Even when strict liability applies, your actions can still reduce damages through comparative fault. 

Florida dog bite laws can bar recovery in many negligence actions if you are found more than 50% at fault. Do not aim to guess fault in the moment. Be sure to stick to facts, and avoid lines like ‘I shouldn’t have touched the dog.’

4.Damages are not just the ER bill

A bite can mean stitches, infection care, scar treatment, and follow-ups. It can also mean missed work, disrupted sleep, and anxiety. Strict liability is about damages suffered, so documentation drives value. Be sure to keep every receipt, and track pain days and limits, like trouble driving or lifting. Ask your doctor to note restrictions in writing.

5.The filing window is short, so act with urgency

You have two years to sue for negligence in Florida. This makes early evidence even more important because memories fade and records get harder to pull. Report the bite to animal control, get contact information for witnesses, and request the incident report. If an insurer calls, you can listen, but you do not need to rush into a recorded statement on day one.

Endnote

Strict liability can make Florida dog bite cases clearer, but it does not make them effortless. Evidence and timing still drive results. Focus on care first, then preserve proof while details are fresh. If you need advice, a Florida attorney can review your facts and deadlines.

Photo: Ivan Babydov via Pexels.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE IN SUPPORT OF DCREPORT’S NONPROFIT NEWSROOM

The post Florida’s Strict Liability Rule for Dog Bites: What it Means for Victims appeared first on DCReport.org.

Two days before money for Homeland Security is set to expire, Congress is seemingly helplessly snared in debate over often brutal tactics of masked federal agents in the national deportation campaign, including two shooting deaths of citizens by agents.

Top immigration officials faced sharp questions yesterday at a congressional hearing about aggressive immigration policies, but little seemed to point to compromise about tactics. Heads of the three immigration enforcement efforts did not even acknowledge problems, whether in anonymity, lack of warrants or training.

Even the prospect of withholding money from the department does not seem to be stalling enforcement efforts or prompting much activity that looks like trying to resolve outstanding budget issues. Indeed, from the silence of administration officials, the plan for partial government shutdown seems to be that ICE agents continue full bore while other functions slow or shut in the 260,000-employee agency.

Skepticism about the efficacy of Congress aside, it seems absurd that our government cannot handle a conversation better about holding ICE to the same standards as any local police department or even lift this debate an inch over partisanship.

Even with the “drawdown” of 700 agents from the 3,000 deployed to Minneapolis, the roundups are continuing. Reports of federal officers near schools and homes continue to circulate on social media and many immigrant families remain hidden at home. So, too, are the protests continuing, including one this weekend in which, incongruously, sex toys were being thrown around outside the federal building and 40 were arrested.

Residents still brave the cold to observe federal officers,  honking horns and blowing whistles to alert neighbors, volunteers are shuttling immigrants to jobs and delivering food and diapers.

ICE agents were active in a small town in Idaho, where local authorities were not consulted, while being cut back in Maine after Republican Sen. Susan Collins complained to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

A national boycott  of big companies that have remained silent about immigration enforcement excesses is gaining a toehold, even as Donald Trump and his administration holler about disloyal Americans who question his policies on the street, among Olympic athletes or public events. We also saw street protests in Milan from Italians upset about ICE agents being deployed to the Olympics as security consultants.

In Washington

Time is running out for any bipartisan deal on passing the remaining Homeland Security budget bill. Bills to fund the rest of government for the year have been passed. Even proposals for stopgap efforts for more time seemed doomed by the Senate math needed to secure sufficient votes.

Despite some exchange of proposals on Monday, the basics have not changed: Democrats, appalled by scenes from Minneapolis, want legislation to require ICE drop masks and eliminate warrantless searches in homes and businesses, all included in a list of proposed changes to ICE. Republicans, including Trump,  have issued an outright dismissal, and, indeed, want legislation to ban “sanctuary” cities that limit cooperation by local police with immigration enforcement. A unreleased White House counterproposal to Democratic demands “included neither details nor legislative text” and does not address “the concerns Americans have about ICE’s lawless conduct,” said Democrats.

At this stage, a Homeland Security shutdown can only be averted if all 100 senators agree to hold a vote before Thursday night when several senators are scheduled to depart for the Munich Security Conference. Republicans note that ICE already has funds by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, so a shutdown will affect critical agencies like FEMA, TSA and the U.S. Coast Guard.

Instead, Republicans are pushing the  SAVE America Act which requires voters to show proof of U.S. citizenship in federal elections despite laws that already bar non-citizens from federal voting. It also requires states to remove undocumented immigrants from voter rolls, though non-citizens now can vote legally on local elections in several states. Despite all the noise, there is little evidence that voting by undocumented immigrants has had any impact on federal elections, and the proposal will not pass in the Senate.

While voting is related to immigration enforcement, Democrats see Trump’s efforts to “nationalize elections” among a series of actions to tilt results of the November elections.

In Minneapolis and Beyond

The daily drumbeat of legal and political cases arising from deportations continues.

–The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension says it “remains committed” to working with the FBI and the Department of Justice, but there are no plans for how a joint homicide investigation will proceed in the  fatal shooting of Alex Pretti. The Pretti family has gone to court to get access to the names of the border patrol agents who shot him, though journalists have identified them.

–A review by Politico of hundreds of cases brought by ICE detainees across the country shows judges increasingly furious and exhausted by the Trump administration’s tactics of delaying, avoiding or outright ignoring their orders. Homeland Security responded by criticizing “activist judges” who “thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate for mass deportations.” The statement didn’t directly address judges’ complaints about their orders being violated.

–A federal appeals court in California ruled that the Trump administration legally may lift Temporary Protective Status it had awarded for 60,000 refugees from Nepal, Honduras and Nicaragua after a similar Supreme Court ruling on Venezuelans. A separate ruling has temporarily blocked lifting the status for Haitians.

–A district court disallowed a California law requiring federal agents to unmask, but said it could require agents to carry identification. The case turned on whether state law enforcement officers also faced the requirement.

–An immigration judge ended removal proceedings against Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts graduate student from Turkey was had been detained by border police for her wriitings in graduate school.

–Democratic U.S. Representatives Angie Craig and Betty McCollum of Minnesota said they were denied entry to ICE holding facilities in Minneapolis in violation of law,

–White House officials say at least 4,000 arrests have been made in Minnesota since Dec. 1, and federal authorities were moving to reinstate deportation proceedings against the Ramos family, whose five-year-old boy in a bunny-hat has become a national symbol, after a court ordered their release.

–Even as Trump and Noem continued to thunder about criminals taken off the street, a CBS reported obtaining an internal Homeland Security memo detailing that fewer than 14% of those arrested nationwide in 2025 had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses.

Your government at work.

OUR NONPROFIT NEWSROOM NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT. PLEASE CONSIDER A DONATION TODAY TO HELP KEEP OUR VOICE ALIVE AND HEALTHY.

The post Frozen Talks on ICE Tactics appeared first on DCReport.org.

That phrase was uttered this time by, of all people, Marjorie Taylor Greene after she had visited the ultra-secure room in the Department of Justice where members of Congress can read, but not copy, the unredacted Epstein files. Greene’s sometime friend, more often rival, Lauren Boebert emerged from what is now being called “the redaction room” confirming that there are “definitely” more co-conspirators of Epstein than have been revealed and that Ghislane Maxwell, currently domiciled in a minimum security prison facility in Texas, should spend more time behind bars and should not be granted clemency by Donald Trump.

Good luck with that, Lauren, given the implied threat made yesterday by Maxwell’s lawyer that if she is pardoned, she could exonerate Donald Trump and Bill Clinton -- the ability to exonerate meaning that she also has the ability to incriminate.

The big headline of the day was made by Congressman Jamie Raskin, who upon exiting the redaction room told the press that a search of all the unredacted Epstein files – not just the redacted files released publicly – revealed that Donald Trump’s name appears more than one million times. That means Trump is mentioned in one way or another 960,000 more times in the files that haven’t been released than the 38,000 times his name appears in the files the DOJ has revealed. Remember last spring, when we learned that FBI agents had been sent from all over the country to go through the Epstein files? We were told that they worked for weeks. What we suspected but weren’t told was that their job was to black-out Trump’s name every time they found it.

Let’s take a moment to ponder how the name of one man, who is now the President of the United States, appears so many times in what have been called the Epstein files, but in reality are mainly the work product of three separate criminal investigations of Jeffrey Epstein. These include the initial investigation of Epstein that began in Palm Beach in 2004 for sexual abuse and unlawful sex with minors; the federal investigation of Epstein and four co-conspirators that began in 2006 and ended in 2008 with a corrupt plea deal that cancelled the federal investigation in favor of a guilty plea to a state charge for soliciting a minor for prostitution; and the federal investigation in New York City that began in 2018 and resulted in a 2019 charge for sexually exploiting and trafficking underage girls in multiple locations.

The point is, ordinary citizens of the United States don’t have “files” devoted to them that contain millions of pages of documents. For such files to be accumulated, you have to be under criminal investigation. What we have been calling “files” are actually evidence from the multiple investigations of Epstein. So, if your name appears more than a million times along with the target of a criminal investigation, or in this case investigations, that means you were associating with a criminal.

One of the things reported today by members of Congress who saw the unredacted files was the existence of an email between Epstein and his criminal associate, Ghislane Maxwell, in which they discussed a phone call with Trump during which he admitted that Epstein had never had his Mar a Lago membership revoked because he never had been a member. He was a guest of the club’s owner every time he visited Trump’s Mar a Lago, and as a guest, he had never been asked or told to leave the club. That exchange of emails was written in 2009, the year after Epstein completed his so-called jail sentence that did not require him to actually be behind bars during the day, when he was permitted to be at his Palm Beach office or residence.

So, this piece of evidence from the unredacted files seems to prove that either Epstein or Maxwell was still speaking with Trump a year after Epstein’s conviction for soliciting a minor girl for prostitution. In other words, Trump knew what Epstein was doing with underage girls, a fact confirmed in yet another unredacted file about a conversation between Trump and the Palm Beach chief of police during which Trump confessed that “everybody knew” what Epstein had been doing.

What else is revealed in the 960,000 mentions of Donald Trump that are in the unredacted files that have not been released by the Department of Justice? As of today, we do not know.

What we do know is that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were close friends in New York and Palm Beach. We know that Trump traveled on Epstein’s business jet that was called the “Lolita Express.” We know from photographic evidence that Trump was close enough to Epstein that he appeared in photographs with the woman who would become his wife, Melania, alongside Epstein and his criminal associate, Ghislane Maxwell. We know from the unredacted files that Epstein claimed to have introduced Trump to Melania. We know that Trump appointed two men who appear in the Epstein files to his government – Howard Lutnick as Labor Secretary and John Phelan as Secretary of the Navy. Lutnick now admits to having visited Epstein’s Caribbean island and being in business with him. Phelan is listed at least twice on Epstein’s “Lolita Express” flight logs. We know that Trump contributed the notorious cartoon sketch of a naked woman’s body and poem about shared secrets to Epstein’s birthday book.

We know that these two men are revealed to be very, very close in the files that have been released, and we know there are at least 960,000 more mentions of Trump’s name in the unredacted files that have not been released.

This is why Trump is employing the Roy Cohn defense of deny, deny, deny. It is why he has dispatched his former criminal attorney and current Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to declare on network television that the Epstein review “is over,” when clearly it is not.

This story is not going away. The way the drip-drip-drip of revelations is going, the Epstein files with their repetition of the name of Donald Trump, will still be in the news after Labor Day this year when the midterm campaigns for Congress kick into gear.

When you’ve lost Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, both of whom have had a look at the unredacted Epstein files, you have a whole lot to worry about. Trump is cornered by the life of sexual abuse he led in the past. He doesn’t just face allegations from women and a legal judgement against him from a woman he raped. His associations with a pedophile are in files from a criminal investigation. Even his wife, the First Lady, is in the files.

We will be treated to many more midnight Truth Social rants in the weeks and months to come. The Epstein criminal files are much, much worse than we think, that is now for certain.

Leave a comment

Share

Give a gift subscription

The excruciating fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and intensive care nurse, at the hands of federal agents on January 24, has thrust into public consciousness the intersection of gun carrying and public demonstrations.

While many details of the encounter are still murky, Pretti was lawfully carrying a handgun at a public demonstration but did not deploy or display the weapon. From cellphone footage and eyewitness accounts, after being pepper sprayed and wrestled to the pavement, an agent appears to have retrieved Pretti’s gun. About a second later, agent gunfire erupted, with 10 shots fired in less than five seconds. Pretti died at the scene. To be clear, none of this is to suggest that Alex Pretti deserved his fate for lawfully carrying a gun.

He absolutely did not.

Yet almost immediately after the shooting, FBI director Kash Patel said “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple.” President Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, all criticized Pretti for carrying a gun to a public demonstration.

Gun groups immediately took issue with the comments, including the National Rifle Association and the Gun Owners of America, which said that the Second Amendment “protects Americans’ right to bear arms while protesting.”

This fraught political moment has thus found the Trump administration in the uncomfortable position of taking criticism from both liberals who blame heavy-handed federal agent tactics and conservatives who bristle at the administration’s seeming abandonment of public gun carry rights.

On the one hand, civilian gun carry is indeed a right under the Second Amendment according to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the Bruen case where the high court said that individuals have a “right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” The court proposed no exception for doing so in a public gathering.

On the other hand, the consequences of such action are clear. Public gun carrying, especially in the context of a public demonstration or similar gathering is, no matter the intentions of the carrier, a terrible idea.

Even though most of those who acquire guns for self-defense say that they feel safer having them, when the public is polled on the matter, the response is fear. For example, when asked in a Gallup poll how safe they would feel in a “public place” that allowed the concealed carry of firearms, 65% of the public said less safe, 25% more safe, and 8% no difference.When asked who they thought should be allowed to carry concealed firearms in a public place, 44% said only “safety officials,” 26% said only those with a “clear need,” and 27% said private citizens.

Public impressions aside, numerous studies spanning disciplines from psychology to criminology make clear that the presence of guns in the presence of others inflames aggression and makes violence more, not less, likely. For example, a study of over 30,000 public demonstrations from 2020 to 2021 found that violence was more than six times more likely to break out when guns were present.

A study from Stanford University of four decades of data found that states that adopted more liberal gun carry laws, and therefore more civilian gun carrying, saw an increase in violent crime of from 13% to 15%. Numerous studies of states that have adopted broad “stand your ground” laws (meaning that people when confronted with a perceived threat in public had no duty to retreat) and that also have liberal gun carry policies have seen significantly higher rates of gun killings. A study of intimate partner violence found that such violence was three times more likely when guns were present. In short, more guns lead to more crime.

Finally, the link between civilian gun carrying in society and mayhem was well understood by our ancestors. From the 1600s to the start of the twentieth century, every state in the country enacted laws that restricted concealed weapons carrying, and three-fourths of the states had laws restricting open weapons carrying.
The Supreme Court has carved out a new right pertaining to gun carrying.

But that does not make it a good idea. The slogan that “an armed society is a polite society” is both wrong and inimical to public safety.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE IN SUPPORT OF OUR NONPROFIT NEWSROOM.

The post What Happens When the Second Amendment Collides With Public Safety? appeared first on DCReport.org.