Dexter’s Law.
Florida’s statewide animal-abuser provision, effective January 1, 2026 — and the reason ProtectedPets started here.
What the law did
Dexter’s Law took effect on January 1, 2026. It directed the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) to maintain a statewide database of people convicted of aggravated animal cruelty, and it added sentencing enhancements for animal cruelty. A listing runs for ten years and resets if the person re-offends.
How the database is populated
The FDLE database is built from final dispositions — convictions and guilty or no-contest pleas under Florida’s aggravated-cruelty statute (Fla. Stat. 828.12). It is a forward-looking feed: it fills in as new dispositions are reported, rather than reaching back to catalog every older case. The official record currently shows names only.
The gap it left
When the database launched, advocates who had pushed for the law were openly disappointed with how it shipped — a bare list with little identifying information, hard for an ordinary member of the public to actually use. The records exist and are public; they just aren’t presented in a way that’s usable, and they sit apart from the county registries and court dockets that hold the rest of the picture.
That gap is exactly what ProtectedPets addresses: a clear, neutral front end over the FDLE database and Florida’s county registries and tracked cases — each record shown verbatim, attributed, and linked back to its official source. We don’t replace the official record; we make the official record legible.
See the full list of sources we draw from, our methodology, or the current Florida coverage.