Mr. Baldwin’s involuntary manslaughter trial in the “Rust” shooting came to a stunning end after the judge left the bench to examine ammunition in the courtroom.
NYT
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 manslaughter prosecution of Mr. Baldwin is over. Mr. Baldwin had faced up to 18 months in prison if he had been convicted.
“There is no way for the court to right this wrong,” Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer said in court as Mr. Baldwin wept.
It was a stunning end to the trial of Mr. Baldwin, who was accused of involuntary manslaughter after a gun he was rehearsing with fired a live round on the “Rust” film set. Mr. Baldwin had been told the gun was “cold,” meaning it should have been impossible to fire.
Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer, was killed in the 2021 shooting.
The dismissal followed a dramatic scene when a manila envelope of previously unexamined evidence was brought into the courtroom. Judge Marlowe Sommer then 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.
Lawyers for Mr. Baldwin called for the case to be dismissed, accusing the state of failing to disclose that it had been given a batch of rounds said to be connected to the case when the defense asked to review all the ballistic evidence.
“They buried it,” Luke Nikas, a lawyer for Mr. Baldwin, said in court on the third day of the trial. “They put it under a different case with a different number.”
The failure to disclose the new evidence posed a major legal problem because the state is required to turn over key evidence like this to the defense.
The judge’s order lifted a significant weight from Mr. 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. If convicted, he would have faced up to 18 months in prison.
Mr. Baldwin has vehemently denied responsibility for Ms. Hutchins’s 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,” meaning that it should have been impossible to fire.
Lawyers for Mr. 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 F.B.I. testing that broke key internal parts of the gun. But the judge rejected each of their attempts, until the latest one.
The defense lawyers made the successful bid for dismissal during a tense hearing at the Santa Fe County District Courthouse, telling Judge Marlowe Sommer that the withheld evidence had deprived them of the opportunity to mount their defense, which has focused partly on the unresolved question of how live rounds ended up on the “Rust” set.
The lead prosecutor in the case, Kari T. Morrissey, has blamed the movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, for the live rounds, which the armorer denied. Ms. Gutierrez-Reed was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for loading the live round into the gun that Mr. Baldwin was rehearsing with, and is currently serving 18 months in prison.
The ammunition examined in court on Friday came from a man named Troy Teske, a friend of Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s stepfather, Thell Reed, who is a well-known Hollywood armorer.
He first surfaced in the trial on Thursday, as Mr. Baldwin’s defense team questioned a crime scene technician. It emerged that Mr. Teske, a retired police officer, had gone to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office around the time of Ms. 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 Mr. Teske and saved the ammunition, but that she put it under a different case number than the “Rust” case.
Ms. Morrissey said in court that, after viewing a photo provided by Mr. 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 Ms. Morrissey on Thursday, Ms. Poppell said the rounds that Mr. Teske had brought to the sheriff’s office looked dissimilar to the live rounds found on the “Rust” set.
But when the judge asked to see the ammunition, and it was brought into court, it became clear that at least one round did resemble the ammunition collected on the set.
When Judge Marlowe Sommer asked if any rounds were similar to what was found after the “Rust” shooting, Ms. Poppell acknowledged that at least one had a particular kind of casing and primer “similar to what was collected on set.”
After the judge examined the rounds, she sent the jury home for the weekend.
The prosecutor said that she had not seen all the ammunition provided by Mr. Teske in person or the report that Ms. Poppell wrote about it. “I’ve never seen these until this morning,” she said.
The judge’s decision on Friday was the latest twist in a case that has had many. After Mr. Baldwin was first charged in January 2023, the manslaughter charge was downgraded after prosecutors acknowledged that it was based on a law that did not exist at the time of the shooting, and a mandatory five-year prison sentence for a conviction was replaced with a maximum sentence of 18 months.
Then, the special prosecutor handling the case stepped down after Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Ms. Morrissey, decided to take the case to a grand jury, which indicted Mr. Baldwin on a charge of involuntary manslaughter.
There have 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 on Friday, as it looked increasingly possible that the new evidence could disrupt the case, Mr. 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.
In the courtroom, his wife, Hilaria Baldwin, embraced him. He smiled as he chatted with his brother Stephen Baldwin and court employees.
