On July 9, 2026, the Florida Supreme Court decided Publix Supermarkets, Inc. v. Goga, No. SC2024-0669, and swept aside more than two decades of district-court doctrine on how appellate judges should review a trial court’s dismissal for fraud on the court. Writing for a five-Justice majority, Justice Grosshans held that the “more stringent” or “narrowed” abuse-of-discretion standard, traceable to the Second District’s decision in Jacob v. Henderson, 840 So. 2d 1167 (Fla. 2d DCA 2003), is inconsistent with basic principles of appellate review and should not be used. The Court quashed the Fourth District’s decision in Goga, disapproved the Third District’s decision in Willie-Koonce v. Miami Sunshine Transfer & Tours Corp., 233 So. 3d 1271 (Fla. 3d DCA 2017), and approved the First District’s framework from Pro Choice Remediation, Inc. v. Old Dominion Insurance Co., 400 So. 3d 789 (Fla. 1st DCA 2024). The result matters for every Florida civil practitioner drafting or defending a fraud-on-the-court motion.
The Setup
The underlying facts read like a defense-verdict highlight reel. Jonida Goga slipped on spilled dish soap in a Pompano Beach Publix and fell. Security footage showed her continuing to shop after the fall, wandering the wine section, and, with the help of a customer-service manager, purchasing a bottle of champagne. She then sued Publix for premises liability, alleging injuries to her neck, back, pelvis, and hip, and seven months of spinal treatment.
Over more than two years of discovery, Goga swore, in interrogatory answers and deposition testimony, that she could no longer lift anything heavy, play in the pool, walk or stand for long periods, take her two children out alone, lift her young kids, bend at the waist, or run. She elaborated at deposition that “there were a lot of cant’s.” She then reaffirmed those limitations in a supplemental interrogatory answer.
Publix, meanwhile, had hired a private investigator. The videos showed Goga picking up and carrying her children across parking lots, bending at the waist while loading and unloading her vehicle, walking with groceries, and playing in the pool, all without visible discomfort. On that record, Publix moved to dismiss for fraud on the court, citing the Third District’s Willie-Koonce decision as “extremely analogous.”
After an evidentiary hearing at which Goga testified and the videos were played, the trial court dismissed her complaint in its entirety with prejudice. The court found by clear and convincing evidence that she had “intentionally and repeatedly lied,” that her attempts to reconcile the discrepancies at the hearing were not credible, and that her fraud “comprehensively infect[ed] the integrity of th[e] action.”
The Fourth District, applying what it called a “more stringent abuse of discretion standard,” affirmed the fraud finding but reversed the sanction. In the district court’s view, only Goga’s claims for pain and suffering and lost wages depended on her tainted testimony, so those alone should be dismissed. Her claim for medical expenses, said the Fourth District, rested on “objective evidence” and should be reinstated. Goga v. Publix Supermarkets, Inc., 383 So. 3d 490, 496–97 (Fla. 4th DCA 2024).
The Holding
The Supreme Court quashed the Fourth District, disapproved the Third District, and adopted the First District’s framework. Under Publix v. Goga, the three traditional standards apply, each to its proper piece of the trial court’s ruling:
- Factual findings (the nature and extent of the party’s deception) are reviewed for competent, substantial evidence.
- Legal conclusions (whether that deception constitutes fraud on the court permeating the entire proceeding) are reviewed de novo.
- Choice of sanction (dismissal, or something less) is reviewed for abuse of discretion, applying the ordinary “no reasonable person” test from State v. Coney, 845 So. 2d 120 (Fla. 2003).
The majority’s reasoning is worth pausing on, because it is going to be cited well beyond the fraud context:
- A “narrowed” or “more stringent” abuse-of-discretion standard is category confusion. As the Court put it, “[a] trial court can only abuse discretion it possesses.” Whether the court had discretion in the first place depends on antecedent findings of fact and conclusions of law, each with its own established standard of review. Layering a special reasonableness standard on top of those separate inquiries “blurs the line” between them and, in practice, invites appellate reweighing of evidence.
- The severity of the sanction is already baked into ordinary abuse-of-discretion review. Appellate courts routinely apply the traditional standard when reviewing sanction choices under Mercer v. Raine, 443 So. 2d 944 (Fla. 1983), and Ham v. Dunmire, 891 So. 2d 492 (Fla. 2004). There is no doctrinal reason to invent a separate, tougher standard just because dismissal is severe.
- The district courts had been applying this “unique” standard inconsistently anyway. Some applied it to the trial court’s entire ruling, others only to the sanction, still others only to the fraud finding. The Court flagged that inconsistency as a symptom of the doctrine’s incoherence.
- The Fourth District’s “objective evidence” carve-out fails on its own terms. Goga’s medical-expense claim was not, in the Court’s view, actually severable from her subjective testimony, and the majority disposed of that argument in a footnote. That is a warning shot against future attempts to preserve slices of a case where fraud has permeated the whole record.
Applying the corrected framework, the majority held that the trial court’s factual findings were supported by competent, substantial evidence, that its legal conclusion of pervasive fraud followed as a matter of law, and that dismissal was well within its sound discretion. The Fourth District’s decision was quashed and the case was remanded with instructions to reinstate the trial court’s original dismissal with prejudice.
The Dissent
Justice Labarga alone dissented. His argument, in short, is constitutional: Article I, section 21 of the Florida Constitution guarantees open courts, and the “more stringent” review standard was a doctrinal expression of Florida’s strong preference for adjudicating cases on the merits. By eliminating it, the dissent contends, the majority “enlarges the scope of the discretion of trial courts” and lets judges “subordinate the policy of favoring adjudication on the merits” to competing integrity interests. The dissent endorses the Fourth District’s bifurcated approach as the correct way to balance the two.
Justice Tanenbaum did not participate. The vote was therefore 5–1 in favor of the Pro Choice framework, which is as decisive a signal as this Court gives on standard-of-review questions.
Why This Matters, in One Sentence
The doctrinal fig leaf that plaintiffs’ counsel could hide behind on appeal in fraud-on-the-court cases — the sense that appellate courts would give the trial court’s dismissal a second look under a stricter lens — is gone. Trial courts now have exactly the discretion the ordinary rules give them, and that is a lot.
Practice Pointers
- For defendants: move to dismiss with more confidence. Publix v. Goga means a well-supported trial-court dismissal order is now considerably harder to unwind on appeal. Build the record with contemporaneous discovery, deposition transcripts, and, where appropriate, surveillance video that directly contradicts the plaintiff’s sworn statements. The trial court’s credibility findings will get real deference under the competent, substantial evidence standard.
- For plaintiffs: manage client testimony from day one. Every civil plaintiff should be counseled, on the record, that inconsistencies between deposition, interrogatories, and later evidence can end the case. The “just cross-examine them at trial” position urged by the Goga dissent is no longer a safe harbor when the discrepancies rise to the level of intentional deception.
- Stop framing appeals around a “narrowed” or “more stringent” standard. Any brief still citing Beseler, Jacob, Ramey, Empire World, or 940 Ocean Drive for that proposition needs to be rewritten. Ask instead which piece of the trial court’s ruling is under review, and match the standard to it: competent substantial evidence for facts, de novo for law, abuse of discretion for sanction.
- The “objective evidence” carve-out is likely dead. The Fourth District’s idea, that a medical-expense claim could survive dismissal because it depended on “objective” evidence, was rejected on the merits and disparaged in a footnote. Do not build a defense to a fraud-on-the-court motion around the premise that some claims can be surgically preserved when the plaintiff’s testimony infects the record.
- Trial-court findings drive everything. Because the appellate court now must accept factual findings supported by competent, substantial evidence, the evidentiary hearing at the trial-court level is the ballgame. Bring your best witnesses and your cleanest exhibits, argue for detailed written findings, and, if you lose, preserve every credibility ruling for appeal.
The broader takeaway is one the Florida Supreme Court has been signaling for several terms now: standards of review are jurisdictional in character, not case-management tools, and district courts should not be modifying them to reach preferred outcomes. Draft to the ordinary standards. The Court is watching.