2024-07-13 18:55:01
In a scene befitting a Hollywood legal thriller, Alec Baldwin’s involuntary manslaughter trial came to an abrupt and stunning end Friday as a judge threw out the case with prejudice, capping a legal saga that shadowed the 66-year-old actor’s career and raised questions about the future of gunplay on movie sets.
But how exactly did the prosecution’s case come apart — and so quickly? NBC News followed every minute of the abbreviated trial and kept track of the key moments.
Baldwin’s team accused the prosecution of hiding evidence
Baldwin was charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of Halyna Hutchins, a 42-year-old cinematographer who was fatally shot on the set of the Western film “Rust” in 2021 after a prop gun discharged. Baldwin, who was holding the revolver at the time, pleaded not guilty in the case and said he believed the weapon was loaded with blanks, not live rounds.
The specific issue that led to the downfall of the prosecution’s case arose Thursday, on the second day of the trial. Alex Spiro, Baldwin’s lead attorney, asked Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office crime scene technician Marissa Poppell whether a “good Samaritan” had come to authorities with ammunition earlier this year.
Poppell confirmed under oath that the sheriff’s office was given Colt .45 rounds by Troy Teske, a former police officer and friend of Thell Reed, the stepfather of “Rust” armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed. In fact, according to that testimony, Teske dropped off the rounds on the same day Gutierrez-Reed was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in Hutchins’ death and sentenced to 18 months behind bars. (She is appealing.)
Spiro and Baldwin’s other attorneys pounced on this revelation, arguing that prosecutors had concealed evidence of ammunition that may have been linked to the fatal shooting. The defense lawyers asked the judge to dismiss the case, arguing in part that they should have had the ability to determine for themselves whether the ammunition brought in by Teske was important.
The prosecutors in the “Rust” case claimed the disputed ammunition was not hidden from the defense or linked to the case.
But Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer, who spent hours Friday listening to witnesses and weighing the motion to dismiss, ultimately sided with Baldwin’s lawyers.
“The late discovery of this evidence during trial has impeded the effective use of evidence in such a way that it has impacted the fundamental fairness of the proceedings,” Sommer said from the bench Friday afternoon. “If this conduct does not rise to the level of bad faith it certainly comes so near to bad faith to show signs of scorching.”
“There is no way for the court to right this wrong,” she added. “The sanction of dismissal is the only warranted remedy.” (Sommer dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be filed again.)
Baldwin sobbed and put his face in his hands as Sommer announced her decision. He could have been sentenced to 18 months in prison if he had been convicted.
Kari Morrissey, one of the lead prosecutors, told reporters after the dismissal that she respects the court’s decision yet insisted there was “absolutely no evidence that any of that ammunition is related to the incident involving” Hutchins.
“There is no reason to believe that the evidence that we discussed in court today was related to the set of ‘Rust,’” she said. “It never left the state of Arizona.”
But even before the “Rust” trial came to a sudden conclusion, there were other key moments rife with drama and tension.
Baldwin’s team scored an early legal victory
The day before the trial officially got underway, Sommer ruled that Baldwin’s role as a co-producer of “Rust” was not relevant to his involuntary manslaughter trial.
Sommer’s decision dealt a blow to a key plank of the prosecutors’ strategy. They had planned to argue that Baldwin’s role as co-producer invested him with special responsibility on the set — including on Oct. 21, 2021, the day Hutchins was shot inside a church set at the Bonanza Creek Ranch in Sante Fe County.
“I’m having real difficulty with the state’s position that they want to show that as a producer he didn’t follow guidelines and therefore as an actor Mr. Baldwin did all of these things wrong that resulted in the death of Ms. Hutchins because as a producer he allowed these things to happen,” Sommer said at a pretrial hearing Monday.
“I’m denying evidence of his status as a producer,” she said.
In opening statements, dueling depictions of Baldwin
In a 44-year acting career, Baldwin has been cast as both the heavy and the hero. In opening statements Wednesday, lawyers on both sides of the “Rust” case presented the actor to the jury in similarly contrasting terms.
Spiro told jurors that Hutchins’ death was an “unspeakable tragedy” but that his client “committed no crime.”
“He was an actor, acting,” Spiro said.
Spiro argued that Baldwin could not be found guilty of involuntary manslaughter because prop guns are almost never loaded with live ammunition. He told jurors that actors typically shoot blanks out of real guns — and that his client was simply following film industry norms.
“I don’t have to tell you any more about this, because you’ve all seen gunfights in movies,” Spiro said. (Baldwin stars in “Rust” as a fictional outlaw named Harland Rust. The movie was completed after the fatal shooting, but it has not yet been released.)
Special prosecutor Erlinda Ocampo Johnson asserted in her opening statement that Baldwin skipped safety checks and recklessly handled the gun that killed Hutchins, “a vibrant 42-year-old rising star.” She argued that Baldwin “did his own thing.”
“The evidence will show that someone who played make believe with a real gun and violated the cardinal rules of firearm safety is the defendant, Alexander Baldwin,” Ocampo Johnson said. Ocampo Johnson abruptly resigned from the case on Friday, before it was dismissed.
Bodycam video captured chaos after shooting
The first witness to take the stand Wednesday was Nicholas Lefleur, the first law enforcement officer to arrive at the Bonanza Creek Ranch after the shooting. The jury was shown video from a body camera worn by Lefleur, who was then a Sante Fe County sheriff’s deputy.
The video showed first responders scrambling to help Hutchins inside the film set’s church in the frenzied minutes after the gun went off. In the video, a medic can be heard asking Hutchins whether she can open her eyes after she was wheeled out of the church on a stretcher and loaded into an ambulance.
The wrenching imagery underlined the surprise of the shooting, which sent shockwaves through the entertainment industry and beyond.
