...Coon v. Ledbetter, 780 F.2d 1158 (5th Cir.1986) (recognizing the constitutional claim of arrestee's daughter, who suffered only emotional trauma in the defendants' assault on the family trailer home).
In Coon v. Ledbetter , 780 F.2d 1158 (5th Cir. 1986), we allowed a § 1983 claim for excessive force on behalf of a young child under circumstances somewhat similar to ours. In Coon , the police allegedly fired into a trailer attempting to apprehend the trailer's owner, Billy Dan Coon. Coon's four-year-old daughter, Racheal, was inside the trailer when the shot was fired. Although the facts do not indicate that Racheal suffered anything but "sleeplessness and nightmares" after the incident, we nonetheless found that she had sufficiently alleged a violation of her constitutional rights. Id . at 1160-1161.In Coon , we addressed the contours of the excessive force claim in the context of whether the plaintiffs had adequately alleged a constitutional violation. Id . at 1160-61. We discussed the officers' defense of qualified immunity only insofar as it could arise on retrial. Id . at 1164. We did not, in any case, squarely address the question whether non-physical injury alone could satisfy the Shillingford test (although we certainly implied that it would). Regarding the applicability of qualified immunity, we merely observed that "[u]se of excessive force in making an arrest violates clearly established rights, and the doctrine of qualified immunity therefore does not shield an officer who uses excessive force."
We do not call Coon into question, however. In 1986, Shillingford was "clearly established law" in this area and we had not yet drawn any "bright lines" between constitutional and non-constitutional violations on the basis of physical or non-physical injuries ( see discussion infra at III.B.3). Thus, the Coon court's implicit finding that the officers' conduct there satisfied the Shillingford test (and in particular that Racheal Coon's injuries were "severe," see Shillingford , 634 F.2d at 265) appears justified in light of "clearly established" legal rules at that time.