[dragonwriter]

“Unarmed” is usually relevant because the other facts framing the event make clear that only an armed person could have been a imminent threat to officers or others so aa to justify deadly force.

Babbitt was at the head of a mob breaking through a barricade preventing them from access to members and staff of Congress, against whom the mob was threatening violence, and whom had only seconds before cleared the lobby (and who therefore were in imminent danger of being overtaken by the mob had the mob not been stopped at the barricade.) There were insufficient officers present to control the mob even with deadly force were they not stopped at the barrier.

> If I break the law and an officer shoots me in cold blood, it was my actions, not my beliefs which led to my death. Does that mean I deserved it?

If you break the law in a way which poses an imminent serious threat to other people’s lives, and no other means are available that are likely to stop you, then an officer is certainly justified in using deadly force. (Whether you deserve it is a question of the morality of your act, not the officer’s, which is not germane to the shooting. Maybe your threatening act is under some kind of external compulsion or internal mental disorder that would make you not fully culpable and thus not deserving of the consequences of the justified response to your action. That you don't, in that case, deserve death doesn't make the justified action which proximately causes your death unjustified, though.)