The involuntary manslaughter trial of Alec Baldwin began on Wednesday with prosecutors painting him as a headstrong actor who repeatedly shirked his duty to maintain gun safety on the set of the movie “Rust,” while the defense argued that the death of the movie’s cinematographer was the result of other crew members’ failures.
While Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers framed the 2021 shooting of the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, as a tragic accident, the prosecutors worked to convince jurors that it was a direct result of Mr. Baldwin’s recklessness while handling dangerous weapons on a film set.
Sitting at the defense table in between two of his lawyers, Mr. Baldwin — wearing a suit, patterned tie and thick-framed glasses — listened intently, sometimes taking notes on a legal pad, and looked somber as bodycam footage of the aftermath of the shooting was shown. Supporters sitting behind him included his wife, Hilaria Baldwin, and his brother Stephen Baldwin.
Here are four takeaways from the opening arguments in the first day of Mr. Baldwin’s manslaughter trial in Santa Fe, N.M.
The prosecution will try to show jurors that Mr. Baldwin repeatedly broke gun safety standards specific to the film industry.
While there is no video of the precise moment of the fatal shooting, there is a trove of footage from earlier in the production.
That footage, said Erlinda O. Johnson, one of the special prosecutors arguing the case, would show that Mr. Baldwin made a practice of putting his finger on or around the trigger when he should not have, in violation of Hollywood gun safety guidelines.
“These movie set safety rules require actors, like the defendant, to treat every firearm as though it’s loaded, to never point a firearm at another person, and to never put your finger on the trigger unless you’re prepared to shoot or destroy whatever’s in front of you,” Ms. Johnson said.
Mr. Baldwin has said that shortly before the shooting, Ms. Hutchins had been helping to direct him on where to point the gun.
The defense pointed to the armorer and first assistant director as the people responsible for gun safety checks.
Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Mr. Baldwin, argued that there were people on the “Rust” set who were responsible for checking the gun that day, but that they did not include Mr. Baldwin.
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer on set, loaded the gun that day with five inert rounds that could not fire and one live round, failing to catch the mistake. Dave Halls, the film’s first assistant director, failed to thoroughly inspect the gun and catch the live round. Mr. Baldwin was assured that the gun was “cold,” meaning that it should have been impossible to fire, Mr. Spiro said.
That communicated to the whole production that “there’s nothing in the gun that can hurt anybody,” Mr. Spiro said.
“Cold guns can’t hurt people,” he said. “It’s impossible. Literally impossible.”
Mr. Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer, was convicted earlier this year of involuntary manslaughter for loading a live round into the gun and sentenced to 18 months in prison. Mr. Halls agreed to a plea deal on a charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon, avoiding prison time.
Prosecutors are trying to present Mr. Baldwin as someone who followed his own direction.
To find Mr. Baldwin guilty of involuntary manslaughter, the jury must find that he acted with a willful disregard for the safety of others on the “Rust” set.
In seeking a conviction, the prosecution has argued that Mr. Baldwin did not heed the instructions of the “Rust” director, Joel Souza, on how to handle the gun just ahead of the fatal shooting.
“You will hear the director tell you that many times, the defendant would do his own thing,” Ms. Johnson said in court on Monday.
Mr. Souza, who was injured in the fatal shooting when the bullet passed through Ms. Hutchins and struck him in the shoulder, has said that he had told Mr. Baldwin that he wanted him to slowly pull his gun out of his holster and hold it at an angle but that the actor disagreed, preferring to pull the gun out more quickly and dramatically.
Just before the gun discharged, Ms. Johnson told the jury, Mr. Baldwin twice followed his own preference and pulled the revolver out quickly.
“That third and fatal time he takes it out — once again, fast — hammer is cocked, he cocks the hammer, points it straight at Ms. Hutchins and fires that gun, sending that live bullet right into Ms. Hutchins’s body,” she said.
The defense seemed to allow for the possibility that Mr. Baldwin pulled the trigger.
Mr. Baldwin has vehemently denied pulling the trigger of the gun before it fired, saying that he pulled the hammer all the way back and let it go in an action that might have set it off. Prosecutors have sought to discredit that account, arguing that several rounds of forensic testing found that the gun could not have gone off without pulling the trigger.
At trial, the actor’s lawyers appeared to temper that claim a bit, saying that no witnesses had seen Mr. Baldwin “intentionally” pull the trigger on the set that day. But even if he did, his defense argued, it would not be against the law to do so while filming a scene for a movie.
“On a movie set, you’re allowed to pull the trigger,” Mr. Spiro said in court. “So even if — even if — he intentionally pulled the trigger like the prosecutor just demonstrated, that doesn’t make him guilty of homicide.”
Mr. Spiro warned the jury against deciding a case based on whether or not a defendant “misspoke” or said something that ended up not being correct.
Throughout his opening argument, Mr. Spiro sought to put jurors in the mind-set of a film production, arguing that gunfights in movies rely on actors’ ability to handle guns assuming they are harmless props, not deadly weapons.
“To find out what happened on that movie set you need to do something that the prosecutors could never do,” Mr. Spiro said. “You have to step back and remember what they were doing on a movie set.”
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