Alec Baldwin ‘Rust’ Manslaughter Case Dismissed, Actor Breaks Down in Tears
In a stunning turn of events at Alec Baldwin’s involuntary manslaughter trial, a New Mexico judge dismissed the single felony count filed against the actor on Friday and said prosecutors could not bring it again. The shocking decision followed after Baldwin’s defense lawyers filed an emergency motion alleging prosecutors and investigators withheld evidence.
“There is no way for the court to right this wrong,” New Mexico Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer ruled as Baldwin broke down in tears in the Santa Fe courtroom. “Your motion to dismiss with prejudice is granted.”
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Baldwin, 66, hugged his lawyers Alex Spiro and Luke Nikas and then turned around to hug his weeping wife Hilaria. The scene capped a long criminal court nightmare for the actor in which he had been fighting allegations he recklessly pointed a replica revolver at cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and pulled the trigger on the set of the western movie Rust on October 21, 2021. He has long maintained he did not pull the trigger.
Shock and tears.
This was Alec Baldwin’s reaction after the judge announced she is dismissing the case against the actor in the involuntary manslaughter trial over the death of "Rust" cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
Read more at https://t.co/HkbyfuWIjO pic.twitter.com/QenMNcS6LE— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) July 12, 2024
Jurors were sent home earlier Friday so the court could hear evidence about how a batch of .45 caliber live ammunition belonging to famed Hollywood armorer Thell Reed, the father of Rust’s rookie armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, had been collected and booked by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office last March but not supplied to Baldwin’s defense either physically or through a supplemental evidence report.
In delivering her admittedly “extreme” ruling, Judge Marlowe Sommer said the live ammunition – surrendered by a friend of Thell Reed – could have helped Baldwin undermine prosecutors’ theory of the case and shore up his defense claim that the fatal shooting was unforeseeable. Judge Sommer said prosecutors “unilaterally withheld” the evidence, and that it was both “material” and “favorable” to Baldwin’s defense, the two thresholds necessary for her ruling.
“The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office and the prosecution failed to disclose the supplemental [evidence] report to defense and provide defense an opportunity to inspect the rounds collected into evidence,” she said. “The suppressed evidence is favorable to the accused. It is impeachment evidence (and) is potentially exculpatory to the defense.” She said her ruling did not require a finding of “bad faith” on the part of the law enforcement officials who collected the evidence from a man named Troy Teske on March 6, 2024, the same day Gutierrez-Reed was convicted at her separate involuntary manslaughter trial.
“This evidence is material. 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. The defense is not in a position to test the state’s theory as to the source of the live rounds that killed Ms. Hutchins,” Judge Marlowe Sommer said.
The lead special prosecutor on the case, Kari Morrissey, fought the motion from Baldwin’s defense to the point that she called herself as a witness during the evidentiary hearing Friday. She admitted under oath that her co-prosecutor, Erlinda Johnson, had resigned from the trial earlier in the day amid a disagreement. Morrissey said she never considered the ammunition material to Baldwin’s case because it was never on the Rust movie set and had never even entered the state of New Mexico to her knowledge. She said Teske claimed he had been storing the live ammunition for Thell Reed, but there was never any testing to determine whether any of the cartridges came from the same batch as the live ammunition eventually found on the Rust set.
Morrissey testified that even before Teske surrendered the bullets last March, he was known to prosecutors because Gutierrez-Reed’s defense had named him as a possible witness, though he never testified. Morrissey said that months before Gutierrez-Reed’s trial, she asked Teske to share a photo of the ammunition. “When I saw this photograph, I could see that it was not at all similar to the live rounds on the set of Rust, and I decided not to take any steps to collect this ammunition.” Morrissey said that all six live rounds eventually found on the Rust set were identical, and that they differed from the rounds in the image sent by Teske in terms of color and cone shape.
Under cross-examination by Spiro, Morrissey was asked if she had made disparaging comments about Baldwin to witnesses in the case. She denied it. “I actually really appreciate Mr. Baldwin’s movie. I really appreciated the acting that he did on Saturday Night Live. And I really appreciate his politics,” she testified, referring to Baldwin’s well-known opposition to former president Donald Trump.
In a bombshell moment earlier in the day on Friday, an evidence technician for the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office pulled out the batch of bullets from Teske so the judge could inspect each cartridge. In the evidence envelope filled with loose bullets, there were three cartridges that were a visual match to the live bullets found on Rust. Morrissey told the court she was seeing that ammunition for the first time. Spiro, meanwhile, grilled the technician on the witness stand, saying the bullets were “buried” and “hidden” from the defense under a “perfect plan” that the technician denied.
In the dismissal motion filed by Baldwin’s team Thursday night, his lawyers accused Morrissey and investigators of a cover-up. “The state not only failed to disclose the evidence — it affirmatively hid it under a file number that is unaffiliated with the Rust case, and then failed to disclose the only documentation that it claims to have created that would have alerted Baldwin to the existence of the evidence,” defense lawyer Luke Nikas wrote.
The live bullet that killed Hutchins was a Starline brass cartridge with a nickle primer. Among the bullets owned by Thell Reed and turned in by Teske were three Starline brass cartridges with nickle primers. According to Baldwin’s lawyers, that evidence was crucial because it might bolster the prior claim by Thell Reed that he gave a bucket of live Starline brass bullets to props supplier Seth Kenney as a “write off” after the men worked together on a movie prior to Rust. Kenney would go on to supply blank and inert dummy rounds to Rust. According to Baldwin’s motion for dismissal, it’s possible the live round that killed Hutchins arrived on set in a batch of dummies supplied by Kenney, something Kenney denies. (Kenney has not been charged with anything related to the Rust tragedy.) Either way, the defense argued Friday that it had a right to all evidence related to Kenney because it might create reasonable doubt that Gutierrez-Reed, 27, was the one who brought the live ammunition on set and that Baldwin “should have known” she might do so based on her young age and lack of experience.
On social media Saturday, Baldwin thanked his supporters following the shocking dismissal. “There are too many people who have supported me to thank just now,” the actor wrote. “To all of you, you will never know how much I appreciate your kindness toward my family.”
Friday’s fireworks happened on the third day of the long-awaited criminal trial. Jurors already had heard testimony from seven witnesses. The judge said she would deal with excusing the jury as Baldwin made his way out of the courthouse.
In a statement to Rolling Stone, Jason Bowles, the defense lawyer for Gutierrez-Reed, who is now in custody serving an 18-month sentence while she appeals her verdict, said he would be “filing a motion to dismiss on similar grounds for discovery violations.” He added, “The judge absolutely did the right thing and upheld the integrity of the judicial system.”
One legal expert who followed the hearing on Friday said she expects Gutierrez-Reed’s legal team also will file a motion for her release from prison while she continues to fight her conviction. “A lot of the same aspects of the judge’s decision today apply to her case as well,” Jennifer Burrill, president of the New Mexico Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, tells Rolling Stone.
“In terms of what happened today. the prosecutor putting herself on the stand as a witness is unprecedented,” Burrill says, adding that the resignation of Johnson suggested “egregious” problems with the prosecution. “Erlinda is really well-respected in the community, so to hear that she quit right before they went into that motion hearing was a red flag for sure.”
Speaking to reporters outside the courtroom Friday, Morrissey said she respected the judge’s decision but still did not believe the ammunition collected from Teske was material to Baldwin’s trial. “I’m disappointed, because I believe that the importance of the evidence was misconstrued by the defense attorneys,” she said, according to Variety. “We did everything humanly possible to bring justice to Halyna and to her family, and we’re proud of the work that we did.”
This story was updated Saturday, July 13 with Baldwin’s Instagram post.
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