The judge in the Rust shooting case lit into the New Mexico prosecutors this week, citing “egregious discovery violations constituting misconduct and false testimony elicited during trial.”
In a ruling Wednesday, District Court Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer noted a number of missteps in the state’s case against Rust star and producer Alec Baldwin and earlier the film’s armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed over the October 2021 on-set shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounding of director Joel Souza. Sommer’s 21-page ruling said dismissal was her only option because anything else “would not cure the fundamental unfairness that the State’s misconduct, and its reverberations in trial, had infused into the proceeding.”
Erlinda Johnson and Kari Morrisey were the special prosecutors assigned to the Rust case.
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Sommer dismissed the voluntary manslaughter case against Baldwin on July 12 — three days after the closely watched trial began — but Gutierrez-Reed remains incarcerated after her conviction in March. She now plans to appeal the voluntary manslaughter conviction and 18-month prison sentence. Gutierrez-Reed was found not guilty of a jury-tampering charge.
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On October 21, 2021, a customized Colt .45 was handed to Baldwin inside the church set on Bonanza Creek Ranch just outside Santa Fe by Rust assistant director David Halls. Halls allegedly declared the weapon was a “cold gun,” aka checked to be safe. Halls later testified he had not checked it properly after taking it off Gutierrez-Reed, who was outside the location. The handing off of the gun was 12 days into filming on the low-budget film based on a story conceived by director Joel Souza and Baldwin, who was both the star and a co-producer on the movie.
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In a shootout-scene rehearsal, Baldwin was pointing the 1880s-era gun at the camera when it suddenly fired. A live round discharged from the gun, going through Hutchins and injuring Souza. He recovered in a fairly short time, but the Ukraine-born Hutchins was pronounced dead several hours later. She was 42.
Then-District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies took three months to charge Baldwin and Gutierrez-Reed in January 2023. The Baldwin case quickly fell apart due to incompetence, unconstitutional charges and a politically compromised special prosecutor, and new special prosecutors were brought aboard and the DA moved off the case.
Morrisey and then-fellow special prosecutor Jason Lewis dropped the charges against Baldwin in the spring of 2023 but made it clear they would probably be recharging him. Amid a number of civil cases in California and New Mexico filed against Baldwin and Rust producers, a new grand jury was empaneled in New Mexico in late 2023, and a new indictment was handed down against Baldwin on January 19, 2024.
Dominic Patten contributed to this report.