US actor Alec Baldwin reacts at the conclusion of his trial on involuntary manslaughter at Santa Fe County District Court in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on July 12, 2024.
Credit: Reuters Photo
Santa Fe, New Mexico: A judge in New Mexico dismissed the case against Alec Baldwin on Friday after finding that the state had withheld evidence that could have shed light on how live rounds got onto a film set where the cinematographer was fatally shot.
The dismissal was with prejudice, meaning that the prosecution of Baldwin is over. If he had been convicted of involuntary manslaughter, Baldwin would have faced up to 18 months in prison.
"There is no way for the court to right this wrong," Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer said in court as Baldwin wept.
It was a stunning end to the trial of Baldwin, who was rehearsing with a gun on the Rust film set in 2021 when it fired a live round, killing Halyna Hutchins, the movie's cinematographer. Baldwin had been told the gun was "cold," meaning it had no live ammunition.
The dismissal followed a dramatic scene when the lead prosecutor, Kari T. Morrissey, went from questioning witnesses to taking the stand herself. She gave an account of why a batch of ammunition that had been turned in to the state several months ago by a witness who claimed it was related to the Rust shooting had been put in an entirely different case file and was not handed over to the defense.
"It was my impression that they did not match the live rounds from the set of Rust," Morrissey said on the stand, saying that she had only viewed a photo of the ammunition.
But when the ammunition was brought into the courtroom earlier Friday at the judge's request it became clear that some of the rounds resembled those found on the Rust set.
The new evidence was brought into the courtroom in a manila envelope. Marlowe Sommer put on blue latex gloves, cut it open with a pair of scissors and got down from the bench to examine the ammunition inside in the well of the courtroom as the prosecution and defense surrounded her. The examination determined that three of the rounds did, in fact, resemble the live rounds found on the set of Rust after the shooting.
"I never saw them until today," Morrissey testified when she took the stand.
The failure to disclose the ammunition posed a major legal problem because the state is required to turn over key evidence to the defense.
"They buried it," Luke Nikas, a lawyer for Baldwin, said in court. "They put it under a different case with a different number."
The judge's order lifted a significant weight from Baldwin, a television and movie star whose life and career has been under a shadow of potential criminal liability for nearly three years, as the case against him has gone through a series of twists and turns.
While on the stand, Morrissey acknowledged that the other special prosecutor on the case, Erlinda O. Johnson, had resigned from the case. Johnson had walked out of the proceedings earlier Friday, the third day of the trial, after conferring with the judge; she did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Baldwin has vehemently denied responsibility for Hutchins' death, saying that he had no reason to believe that the gun he was handed on set that day could have been loaded with live ammunition. Live rounds are generally banned on film sets, and witnesses said that the gun was declared "cold."
Lawyers for Baldwin have fought the prosecution at every turn, filing motions to dismiss over the grand jury proceedings, the legal theory of the case and the FBI testing that broke key internal parts of the gun. But the judge rejected each of their attempts, until the latest one.
Morrissey had blamed the movie's armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, for the live rounds, which the armorer denied. Gutierrez-Reed was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for loading the live round into the gun that Baldwin was rehearsing with and is serving 18 months in prison.
The ammunition examined in court Friday came from a man named Troy Teske, a friend of Gutierrez-Reed's stepfather, Thell Reed, who is a well-known Hollywood armorer.
Teske first surfaced in the trial Thursday, as Baldwin's defense team questioned a crime scene technician. It emerged that Teske, a retired police officer, had gone to the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office around the time of Gutierrez-Reed's trial and handed over some ammunition that he believed was related to the case.
The crime scene technician, Marissa Poppell, testified that she had spoken to Teske and saved the ammunition but that she put it under a different case number than the Rust case.
Morrissey said in court that, after viewing a photo provided by Teske, she had determined that the ammunition was not relevant to the Rust investigation because it did not look similar to the live rounds that were collected on the movie set. "This has no evidentiary value whatsoever," she said in court. And under questioning from Morrissey on Thursday, Poppell said the rounds that Teske had brought to the sheriff's office looked dissimilar to the live rounds found on the Rust set.
But when the ammunition was brought into court, and it became clear that some resembled the ammunition collected on the set, Marlowe Sommer sent the jury home for the weekend and continued the hearing on whether the evidence had been mishandled. She found that it had.
"The state's willful withholding of this information was intentional and deliberate," Marlowe Sommer said. "If this conduct does not rise to the level of bad faith, it certainly comes so near to bad faith as to show signs of scorching prejudice."
The judge's decision Friday was the latest twist in a case that has had many. After Baldwin was first charged in January 2023, the manslaughter charge was downgraded as prosecutors acknowledged that it was based on a law that did not exist at the time of the shooting.
Then, the special prosecutor handling the case stepped down after Baldwin's lawyers argued that her appointment violated the state constitution because she also served in another branch of government, as a state lawmaker.
A new prosecution team took over, and it temporarily dismissed the charges against Baldwin after his lawyers argued that the gun might have been modified in such a way that made it more likely to discharge without pulling the trigger. When a forensic report undermined that claim, the new prosecution team, led by Morrissey, decided to take the case to a grand jury, which indicted Baldwin on a charge of involuntary manslaughter.
There had been signs of tensions behind the scenes and criticism of the investigation. Robert Shilling, a former chief of the New Mexico State Police who worked as an investigator for the district attorney's office before being removed from the case, sharply criticized the investigation in an email to prosecutors that later became public.
"The conduct of the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office during and after their initial investigation is reprehensible and unprofessional to a degree I still have no words for," he wrote in the email. "Not I or 200 more proficient investigators than I can/could clean up the mess delivered to your office in October 2022 (1 year since the initial incident inexcusable)."
During the court proceedings Friday, as it looked increasingly possible that the new evidence could disrupt the case, Baldwin seemed to relax somewhat after two days of trial that had drawn dozens of journalists to the courthouse and thousands more spectators to the livestream of the trial online.
When the case was dismissed, Baldwin, openly weeping, turned around and embraced his wife, Hilaria Baldwin, before walking out of court a free man.