SANTA FE, NM — A prosecutor has asked a New Mexico judge to reconsider the case. decision to dismiss an involuntary manslaughter charge against Alec Baldwin in connection with the fatal shooting of a cameraman on the set of a Western film, according to a court document made public Wednesday.
Special prosecutor Kari Morrissey said there were insufficient facts to support the July ruling and that Baldwin’s right to a fair trial had not been violated.
State District Court Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer dismissed the case midway through the trial based on police and prosecutors withholding evidence from the defense in the 2021 shooting of camerawoman Halyna Hutchins on the set of the movie “Rust.”
The charge against Baldwin was dismissed with prejudice, meaning the case cannot be retried once all avenues for appealing the decision have been exhausted.
Baldwin, the lead actor and co-producer of “Rust,” was pointing a gun at cinematographer Halyna Hutchins during a rehearsal when it went off, killing her and wounding director Joel Souza. Baldwin has said he pulled the hammer back — but not the trigger — and the gun went off.
The evidence that ended the case was ammunition brought to the sheriff’s office in March by a man who said it could be related to Hutchins’ murder. Prosecutors said they considered the ammunition unrelated and unimportant, while Baldwin’s attorneys argued they had “buried” it and filed a successful motion to dismiss the case.
In her decision to dismiss the Baldwin case, Marlowe Sommer described “serious breaches of the duty of discovery that constitute misconduct” by law enforcement and prosecutors, as well as false testimony about physical evidence by a witness at trial.
In the request for reconsideration, Morrissey again argued that the secret ammunition was not relevant to the case against Baldwin, as it depended on his responsibility to handle a gun safely in accordance with known industry guidelines.
“No one in the prosecution ever intentionally withheld evidence from the defendant. It simply did not occur to the prosecution that the bullets were relevant to the case, even though they were the same or similar to the actual bullets found on the set of ‘Rust,’” Morrissey wrote.
She claimed that defense attorneys were aware of the bullets but had declined the opportunity to view them before trial.
“This is a smokescreen created by the defense that was intended to influence and confuse the court … and it succeeded,” Morrissey wrote.
Baldwin’s lead attorney, Luke Nikas, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Morrissey’s filing.
Movie gunsmith Hannah Gutierrez-Reed is serving an 18-month prison sentence on an involuntary manslaughter conviction. She was accused of violating standard safety protocols and missing multiple opportunities to detect prohibited live ammunition on set. Assistant director and safety coordinator David Halls pleaded guilty to negligent use of a deadly weapon and was sentenced to six months of unsupervised probation. A guilty plea is not an admission of guilt, but is treated as such for sentencing purposes.
It has not yet been officially determined who brought the live ammunition that killed Hutchins to the set, although prosecutors allege that Gutierrez-Reed was responsible.
The ammunition that killed the case was turned over to a Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office crime scene technician, who filed the evidence under an unrelated case number. Three of the bullets appeared to be real ones that had been recovered from the “Rust” set after the fatal shooting.
The mysterious ammunition was delivered to the sheriff’s office by Troy Teske of Bullhead City, Arizona. He regularly stored guns and ammunition for his friend and longtime movie gun coach Thell Reed, Gutierrez-Reed’s stepfather and mentor as a gunsmith on film sets.
Morrissey asked the judge to order defense attorneys to show when and how they knew about the ammunition Teske had provided, calling the defense’s motion to dismiss the case “a ruse.”
Lawyers for Baldwin have said he did not know live ammunition had been brought to the film set and that prosecutors concealed evidence as they tried to link the live ammunition on set to Gutierrez-Reed. They said prosecutors wanted to emphasize the argument that Baldwin should have acknowledged the gunsmith’s blundering youth and inexperience.
Gutierrez-Reed is requesting that her conviction for involuntary manslaughter be overturned based on allegations of suppressed evidence that emerged during Baldwin’s trial.
Separately, Gutierrez-Reed has requested a plea hearing on a weapons charge, relating to allegations that she brought a gun into a Santa Fe bar weeks before filming began on “Rust.”
Attorney Jason Bowles did not respond to a request for further information.