Jacob Philip and Denver Simmons, who are serving life sentences in a South Carolina prison for unrelated double homicides, spent two and a half hours on April 7, 2017, murdering four inmates in Simmons’s cell. Simmons later said they hoped to get the death penalty. They did not, because the victims’ families objected to their getting what they supposedly wanted.

They lured John King with a promised coffee, strangled him with an extension cord, and stuffed him under a bed. Thirty minutes later, according to a court document, Simmons strangled a second inmate while Philip “stomped” on his ribs, causing them to “pop.” Thirty minutes later, they stabbed their third victim with a broken broom handle. They then used a trash bag to cover the cell door window, and invited into the cell a fourth victim, whom they strangled with their forearms, the extension cord and a broom handle. Apparently sated, they walked to the prison’s administration building and suggested that officers check Simmons’s cell.

This month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit affirmed a district court’s judgment that King’s family cannot sue to hold anyone at the prison responsible for King’s death. Herewith redundant evidence that “qualified immunity” enables government actors to violate constitutional rights with impunity.

This doctrine shields officials from accountability for civil rights violations if there is no “clearly established law” forbidding exactly, or almost exactly, what the official did.

King’s family asserts that his death resulted from prison officials’ being “deliberately indifferent” to the danger he was in.

Sgt. DeWaun McKan conducted the required security checks every 30 minutes, but did not look into Simmons’s cell, as his training required. When alerted to the bodies, McKan neither checked for pulses nor performed CPR, instead radioing for help. King’s family sued McKan and various prison administrators under a theory of “supervisory liability.”

The 4th Circuit affirmed qualified immunity for everyone: “There is no clearly established constitutional right to properly conducted security checks.”

In a demolishing dissent, Judge James A. Wynn Jr. wrote that what the majority called an “atrocity” — an atrocity without a remedy? — occurred because two double-murderers could circulate through the unit unsupervised.

The 4th Circuit has held that “a prison official cannot hide behind an excuse that he was unaware of a risk, no matter how obvious.” And “there is no requirement that the very action in question must have previously been held unlawful for a reasonable official to have notice that his conduct violated that right.”

Qualified immunity has, at most, a narrow justification: Protecting government actors (e.g., police officers) who must make split-second decisions in dangerous situations. Granting qualified immunity in a “failure-to-protect” case constitutes permission for lethal neglect. Americans would gag if they had an inkling of what occurs, unreported, in prisons. Americans should, however, be sickened when judges, with hairsplitting misapplications of qualified immunity, openly abet governmental malfeasance that allows prison violence. When prisoners depend on protection by governments that cannot be held accountable for culpable indifference, mayhem proliferates, lethally.