Court Opinion

ID: 9489011
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:02:16.404354+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:14.529327
License: Public Domain

REAVLEY, Circuit Judge,
joined by POLITZ, Chief Judge, WIENER, BENAVIDES, STEWART, PARKER and DENNIS, Circuit Judges, dissenting.
Without the slightest justification beyond an arrest warrant for a traffic offense, a *405Texas patrolman injured a woman by pulling her out of her car, putting her face-down into a ditch, kneeling on top of her and handcuffing her arms behind her. This court now holds that the patrolman' is immune from liability for his violation of her civil rights. In the 1990’s! In the Fifth Circuit! I dissent.
The panel opinion, 54 F.3d 248 (5th Cir.1995), correctly states-the facts of the case as it comes to us. The jury found that the officer employed force that was clearly excessive and objectively unreasonable, causing a significant injury to the plaintiff. She and the driver of the car testified that the officer jerked her from the car and threw her down into the ditch. She said that her arm, hip and wrists were hurt. A photograph introduced into evidence showed a large discoloration on her upper arm where she said the officer grabbed her. Her psychiatrist testified that she was traumatized emotionally and could suffer psychic instability for years to come.
I. Immunity to Use Excessive Force
Even though the jury verdict, amply supported by the evidence, found the force exercised by the officer to have been objectively unreasonable and excessive, this court renders judgment for the patrolman on qualified immunity grounds. This is a distortion of the law of qualified immunity. The Fourth Amendment protects all persons against unreasonable seizures. Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 109 S.Ct. 1865, 104 L.Ed.2d 443 (1989). An officer who effects an arrest by excessive force against the person acts unreasonably and violates the Fourth Amendment rights of the arrestee. There can be no qualified immunity for that officer.
Qualified immunity is a practical doctrine designed to balance several competing interests. On the one hand, damage suits against officials deter unlawful conduct and vindicate the constitutional rights of victims of official misconduct. Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 813-15, 819-21, 102 S.Ct. 2727, 2736, 2739, 73 L.Ed.2d 396 (1982). On the other hand, social costs inevitably flow when government officials are subjected to lawsuits. These social costs include the expenses of litigation, the diversion of energy from official business, the deterrence of able citizens from acceptance of public office, and the danger that fear of suit will dampen the ardor with which officials discharge their duties. Id. at 813-15, 102 S.Ct. at 2736.
Are any of the interests underlying qualified immunity served by granting immunity to an officer who uses objectively unreasonable force to effect an arrest? Certainly the public wants to deter such action, and the victim has an interest in being made whole from the damages the arrest caused. These interests are not served by granting immunity when objectively unreasonable force is used. On the other hand, need we fear that suits against officers who use objectively unreasonable force will “dampen the ardor with which such officers discharge their duties?” On the contrary, it is our fervent hope that such suits will dampen uncontrolled ardor. It also seems clear that the social costs of lawsuits and diversion of energies of the officer are well worth paying when the officer uses objectively unreasonable force, else such officers should be granted absolute immunity and the Fourth Amendment should be rewritten.
Qualified immunity is given to an officer to protect him from costly and troublesome litigation “unduly inhibit[ing] officials in the discharge of their duties.” Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 638, 107 S.Ct. 3034, 3038, 97 L.Ed.2d 523 (1987). The inquiry is whether the totality of the circumstances justified the actions by which the seizure was carried out. Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1, 6-8, 105 S.Ct. 1694, 1699, 85 L.Ed.2d 1 (1985). The officer is not immune if his actions violated clearly established law. Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 528-30, 105 S.Ct. 2806, 2817, 86 L.Ed.2d 411 (1985) (citing Harlow, 457 U.S. at 817-19, 102 S.Ct. at 2738). The law is clearly established that an unreasonable seizure violates the Fourth Amendment and is grounds for § 1983 liability. Brower v. County of Inyo, 489 U.S. 593, 109 S.Ct. 1378, 103 L.Ed.2d 628 (1989). And the Court has said that the Constitution protects against the unnecessary infliction of pain. Hudson v. McMillian, 503 U.S. 1, 6-8, 112 S.Ct. 995, 999, 117 L.Ed.2d 156 (1992); *406Ingraham v. Wright, 430 U.S. 651, 674-75, 97 S.Ct. 1401, 1414, 51 L.Ed.2d 711 (1977).
The Court does not allow a federal cause of action for every unjustified physical contact. “The Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment necessarily excludes from constitutional recognition de minimis uses of physical force, provided that the use of force is not of a sort ‘repugnant to the conscience of mankind.’” Hudson, 503 U.S. at 9-10, 112 S.Ct. at 1000 (quoting Whitley v. Albers, 475 U.S. 312, 327, 106 S.Ct. 1078, 1088, 89 L.Ed.2d 251 (1986)). Undoubtedly, the same rule applies to excessive force claims under the Fourth Amendment. If the pleading, a Spears1 hearing, or summary judgment record demonstrates conduct and effect of so minor a degree, the officer is entitled to judgment. But surely not because he enjoyed immunity to effect the arrest, or abuse the prisoner, with excessive force.
In the present case the officer used objectively unreasonable force to arrest the plaintiff, and — in addition to lasting psychological harm — injured her arm, hip, and wrists in the process. That ends the qualified immunity inquiry.
The majority, however, are not ended. They go to a footnote in Johnson v. Morel, where the en banc court suggested that a non-physical injury might in that ease not rise to the significance required for a cause of action.2 The court reasons today that, because this footnote could be used to argue that psychological harm could not be the significant injury required for recovery in 1990, the law in this circuit at the time of the arrest gave the patrolman a defense and immunity.
To understand the court’s misreckoning we need to go back to the panel opinion in Johnson v. Moral, 843 F.2d 846 (5th Cir.1988), where the majority there retooled Shillingford v. Holmes, 634 F.2d 263 (5th Cir.1981), to require a severe physical injury as a necessary element of a § 1983 action for the use of excessive force by a state officer. Judge Thornberry’s dissent pointed out the error, see Johnson, 843 F.2d at 848, but this court has continued to hold that this erroneous version of Shillingford was Fifth Circuit law from 1981 until 1989 when the Johnson v. Morel en banc decision downgraded the necessary injury from severe to significant.
The Supreme Court corrected us on the severe/significant injury requirement in Hudson, but we have retained it to immunize the conduct of officers at a time prior to the date of the Supreme Court’s Hudson opinion. We have held that, so long as the prevailing law required proof of a significant injury (after Johnson v. Morel) for the victim to recover damages, there could be no excessive force unless it did cause such an injury. See, e.g., Rankin v. Klevenhagen, 5 F.3d 103, 108-09 (5th Cir.1993); Spann v. Rainey, 987 F.2d 1110, 1114-16 (5th Cir.1993); Valencia v. Wiggins, 981 F.2d 1440, 1448-49 (5th Cir.1993); Mouille v. City of Live Oak, 977 F.2d 924, 928 (5th Cir.1992); King v. Chide, 974 F.2d 653, 656-58 (5th Cir.1992); Pfannstiel v. City of Marion, 918 F.2d 1178, 1184-85 (5th Cir.1990); Mouille v. City of Live Oak, 918 F.2d 548, 551 (5th Cir.1990).
It is a curious twist of law. What, we should ask, is excessive force or objectively unreasonable force? What is its measure? What is its inquiry? Obviously whether it is objectively unreasonable and excessive to ef-féct the arrest, to overcome the resistance or malefaction. The law, clear and certain and known by all reasonable officers, has forbidden force excessive to that purpose. Whether or not the Fifth Circuit has allowed the officer a defense where the excessive force caused lesser injury is a different question. But we have persisted in giving immunity to officers who violated acknowledged constitutional rights by the use of excessive force to arrest, no matter whether any force was justified and no matter how great the force *407employed, so long as the arrestee recovered from his injuries.
Qualified immunity is concerned only with the reasonableness of an officer’s actions. Once an officer uses objectively unreasonable force to effect an arrest, he loses his qualified immunity, whether the other elements of an excessive force claim are clearly established or not.
We can only hope that the manuals and instructions to law enforcement officers have not told them that the Constitution and laws of the United States were so uncertain about their conduct and the rights of the public. That would be to “place various kinds of state-sponsored torture and abuse — of the kind ingeniously designed to cause pain but without a tell-tale ‘significant injury1 — entirely beyond the pale of the Constitution.” Hudson, 503 U.S. at 12-14, 112 S.Ct. at 1002 (Blackmun, J., concurring).
II. Immunity Even to Cause Significant Injury
A. Emotional Injury.
Even if the officer were entitled to immunity so long as no significant injury was suffered by his victim, that would not warrant the court’s dismissal of this plaintiffs case. Because, clearly, she did suffer a significant injury. There was evidence of physical and psychological harm, although the jury was not asked to allocate significance between those'harms. The majority choose the emotional injury for the only significance and hold that an officer would not know in 1990 that he would be liable for a brutal arrest causing non-severe physical injury coupled with severe emotional injury.
Let us suppose that officers had lawyers to advise them on how to escape liability while mistreating arrestees. How much leeway would counsel find in the Johnson v. Morel footnote? The footnote speaks of what is likely and refuses to decide “on the facts before us here” (where the plaintiff had been humiliated by racial epithets) “whether a significant but non-physical injury would be legally sufficient.” See supra, note 2. The Supreme Court in Carey v. Piphus held in 1978 that damages were recoverable for mental anguish in a § 1983 action. 435 U.S. 247, 262-64, 98 S.Ct. 1042, 1052, 55 L.Ed.2d 252 (1978). The Johnson v. Morel decision itself cited Carey for that proposition. In Lynch v. Cannatella, 810 F.2d 1363, 1376 (5th Cir.1987), decided under the Shillingford regime, the Fifth Circuit upheld psychological injury as a sufficient injury to support recovery in an excessive force case. Other cases in this circuit held the same. See, e.g., Checki v. Webb, 785 F.2d 534, 538 (5th Cir.1986) (under Shillingford, “[a] police officer who terrorizes a civilian by brandishing a cocked gun in front of that civilian’s face may not cause physical injury, but he has certainly laid the building blocks for a section 1983 claim against him. Similarly, where a police officer uses a police vehicle to terrorize a civilian ... a court may conclude that the officers have crossed the ‘constitutional line.’ ”); Coon v. Ledbetter, 780 F.2d 1158 (5th Cir.1986) (a young girl who was in a trailer when a deputy sheriff unloaded a round of buckshot into it would prevail on a claim for excessive force, despite suffering no physical injuries, if she could prove the deputy acted at least recklessly); Keyes v. Lauga, 635 F.2d 330, 336 (5th Cir.1981) (plaintiff could recover for excessive force because she suffered mental injuries along with some bruises, a low-grade concussion, and numbness in her left thumb); see also Foulds v. Corley, 833 F.2d 52, 55 (5th Cir.1987) (plaintiffs failure to allege “lasting harm” was not fatal to his § 1983 claim of cruel and unusual punishment because he alleged sufficient pain, suffering, and mental anguish to warrant relief).
Would the legal adviser to the brutish policeman have any reason to believe that this brief footnote did more than reserve judgment on the facts of Johnson v. Morel itself or that it injected uncertainty about psychological injury into the law, limiting the holding of Carey v. Piphus and overruling established law of the circuit? I think not.
The legal adviser would not think the footnote applicable to the present ease for the further reason that this is not a case of a non-physical injury. The plaintiff suffered physical harm as well as emotional harm. The physical injuries were inextricably intertwined with the mental injuries, and the two *408combined to produce a single significant injury. Nothing in the Johnson v. Morel footnote suggests any uncertainty under these circumstances. The Seventh Circuit held in Bailey v. Andrews, 811 F.2d 366 (7th Cir.1987), that “Bailey's physical injuries combined with the emotional distress he testified to could amount to compensable injury” under the Seventh Circuit’s then-existing “severe injury” requirement. Id. at 373.
B. Open Season On The Infirm
The panel dissent, 54 F.3d at 252, argued that under the circuit precedent of Wells v. Bonner, 45 F.3d 90 (5th Cir.1995), the significant injury requirement for an excessive force cause of action could not be met by the aggravation of a preexisting condition. I agree with Judge King that this is an erroneous reading of Johnson v. Morel, and I would not accept such a pernicious rule in any event.

Conclusion

This court today goes far afield in the search for uncertainty in the 1990 law, beyond where any lawyer — let alone a policeman — might have gone. And the court disregards entirely the officer’s conduct as it grants him immunity. I dissent from the rendition of judgment excusing the defendant from liability.

. Spears v. McCotter, 766 F.2d 179 (5th Cir.1985).

. The footnote reads: “We think it unlikely that such a significant injury will be caused by unnecessary force without significant physical injury. However, on the facts before us here, we do not decide whether a significant but non-physical injury would be legally sufficient.” Johnson v. Morel, 876 F.2d 477, 480 n. 1 (5th Cir.1989) (en banc).