Not accurate for the Court to say that there was no controlling law that a reasonable cop ought to have known about (though the Court ruled that this aspect of qualified immunity was irrelevant in this case). Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985) had been decided in this same court and is well-settled, and I can't imagine that there's a cop out there who hasn't heard of the case. The fact that the cop was engaged in an unlawful (if not illegal) act at the time of the shooting (violation of the decedants' due process rights under color of state authority), that makes the shootings a minimum of manslaughter if not murder. I'm smelling political corruption in the prosecutor's office, and possibly malfeasance in office. It is possible to abuse prosecutorial discretion, which is not absolute.