After a Minnesotan woman was bitten by a police dog, she sued the state police. The police claimed sovereign immunity, and the case made its way up to the state supreme court. Now, they’ve just decided a previously unanswered question, ruling that there is no sovereign immunity for dog bites.
The Unfortunate Incident
Cristina Berrier was the woman involved in the police dog bite. If you’re thinking that this happened in the course of her arrest or in a cop trying to stop her from doing something criminal, you might be surprised. The tragic incident was completely civilian, occurring while the cop (and his dog) were off-duty.
In 2019, Berrier worked at a car dealership south of the Twin Cities. That spring, a Minnesota state trooper brought his patrol vehicle to that dealership to get it serviced. Naturally, the trooper came with his police dog, Diesel. But at some point, Diesel attacked Berrier, unprovoked. She suffered some serious injuries from the attack, some of which were permanent.
Understandably upset about the entire incident and the damage it did to her, Barrier wanted to sue. She brought a lawsuit against the Minnesota State Patrol on a negligence theory. She claimed in her complaint that her injuries were a result of the Patrol’s negligence. She later added a claim under Minnesota’s state statute governing dog bites.
Minnesota Dog Bite Law
The statute says that if a dog, unprovoked, attacks or otherwise injures someone who is “acting peaceably” in a place where that person may lawfully be, then the dog’s owner is liable for damages to the attacked or injured person for the full amount of the injury sustained.
Would a policeman or trooper be considered the “owner” of his police dog? Well, the statute defines it broadly. It says that “owners” include “any person harboring or keeping a dog,” although the actual owner has the primary liability. In other words, someone who doesn’t own but is keeping the down can be held “secondarily liable” along with the primary owner.
The law in Minnesota imposes “strict liability” to dog owners for the bites by their furry friends. This means that dog owners are held responsible for damages caused by their dog, even if they weren’t personally at fault. This isn’t true everywhere, though. In some states, the law is written such that the owner is only responsible if they knew or should have known that they the dog was dangerous.
Sovereign Immunity
Barrier would normally not have a hard time bringing the case were it against a typical customer. But in this case, she was suing the state. Those kinds of lawsuits often raise questions about sovereign immunity under the Eleventh Amendment.
Assistant attorneys general for Minnesota argued in court that state agencies, including the State Patrol, were shielded from liability in the case of dog bites under sovereign immunity. The state sovereign immunity statute provides that the “state is not bound by the passage of a law unless it’s either named in the law as someone you can sue, or “unless the words of the act are so plain, clear, and unmistakable as to leave no doubt as to the intention of the legislature.”
The attorneys general reasoned that since the legislature hadn’t specifically named the state as a potential “owner,” sovereign immunity applied.
Minnesota Supreme Court Weighs In
After a good deal of back and forth in lower courts, the case finally made its way up to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which had never had to answer the question of whether animals could be shielded by sovereign immunity.
When the words of a statute are so plain and clear that there is no doubt as to the intention of the legislature that wrote the statute, courts tend to follow that “plain-language” approach. Under this analysis of the state dog bite statute, the Supreme Court found that there is no sovereign immunity for dog bites.
Justice Marget Chutich, delivering the majority opinion, pointed out that there is no indication in the text of the dog bite statute that signal the phrase is limited to non-state or business entities who own dogs.” She reasoned that the phrase “the owner” as used and defined in the statute is broadly inclusive, enough to encompass the State Patrol. “There is no sign that the phrase is limited to non-state or business entities who own dogs,” she wrote.
Disputed Ownership
On top of that, Justice Chutich clarifies that State Patrol officers can be considered “owners” under the statute. She notes that the Minnesota Supreme Court has in previous opinions recognized the state of Minnesota as an “owner” under the dog bite statute.
She also points out that reading the statute to include the State Patrol as “owners” serves public policy interests. If the act is going to do what it intends to do – protect everyone who is attacked by dogs – then there’s no good reason to distinguish between dogs owned by individuals or civilians, organizations, or businesses, and those owned by the state. Applying the statute more broadly to any dog owner would better serve the law’s intended purpose, also because it would incentivize state agencies like the state patrol to control their dogs.
What Next?
The court didn’t seem concerned that their decision would expose the state of Minnesota to broad liability in the future. The point of sovereign immunity is “to protect the fiscal stability of government.” But only three state agencies in Minnesota have active canine programs, and the state patrol has about 16 service dogs. Those are trained to detect certain odors like narcotics or explosives, rather than being trained in apprehension or tracking of people. Since the work police dogs do isn’t bite-related, the court reasoned there are unlikely to be a lot of lawsuits against the patrol under the dog-bite statute. In other words, the goal of sovereign immunity – basically, to keep the state from going broke with lawsuits against them – should still be served.
In the end, the Minnesota Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s dismissal of the suit against the State Patrol under sovereign immunity. Now that Barrier’s claims are revived, her attorney said he expects to go to trial on both the negligence claim and the claim under the dog bite statute.
Related Resources:
- Injury Claims Against the Government (FindLaw's Learn About the Law)
- Do States Have Sovereign Immunity? (FindLaw's U.S. Constitution pages)
- Dog Bites and Animal Attacks (FindLaw's Learn About the Law)
