In beginning to make their case for Alec Baldwin’s innocence, one of his lawyers, Alex Spiro, argued that the actor could not be found guilty of involuntary manslaughter because it was unthinkable for live ammunition to be loaded into a gun that was being used as a prop on the set of a movie.
He sought to counter the prosecution’s contention that the shooting occurred in a typical workplace, telling the jurors that actors shooting blanks out of real guns is what happens on the set of a western — “You’ve all seen gunfights in movies,” he said.
What was far from routine, he said, was for live ammunition to end up on the set. He said that Mr. Baldwin had been told that day that the gun was “cold,” which he said communicated to the whole production that “there’s nothing in the gun that can hurt anybody.”
“Cold guns can’t hurt people,” Mr. Spiro said. “It’s impossible. Literally impossible.”
The fault of that, he said, lay with the crew members who are supposed to oversee gun safety on the set. He blamed the film’s armorer, who loaded the live round into the gun and has been convicted of manslaughter, and its first assistant director, who took a plea deal for failing to thoroughly inspect the gun to make sure it was loaded only with dummy rounds, which are inert and cannot be fired.
Mr. Baldwin “did not know or have any reason to know that gun was loaded with a live bullet,” Mr. Spiro told the jury. “That live bullet is the key. That is the lethal element.”
The actor has vehemently maintained that he did not pull the trigger on set that day, but the defense seemed to temper that claim. No witnesses saw Mr. Baldwin “intentionally” pull the trigger, Mr. Spiro said, but even if he did, it would have been allowed on a movie set where there is never supposed to be live ammunition.
The defense painted the law enforcement investigation of the case as riddled with errors, including conducting testing on the gun that broke internal mechanisms, and asserted that the prosecution was trying to mislead jurors by arguing that it an actor’s job to check guns on film sets.
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