A prosecutor who oversaw the involuntary manslaughter case against Alec Baldwin has asked a judge in New Mexico to reconsider her dismissal of the charge during the trial.
The judge tossed out the case in July after finding that the state had withheld evidence that could have shed light on how live rounds got onto a film set where a cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, was fatally shot. The judge dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning that it could not be refiled, ending the prosecution of Mr. Baldwin.
But in court papers filed on Friday, Kari T. Morrissey, the special prosecutor, sought to persuade Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer to change her mind, arguing that the evidence in question — a batch of rounds brought to law enforcement this year — was irrelevant to whether Mr. Baldwin was criminally culpable for pointing the gun on set that day.
“Nothing about the details of how the live rounds were introduced to the set is relevant or material to the charges against Mr. Baldwin,” Ms. Morrissey wrote in the court papers, later writing, “there was no cover-up because there was nothing to cover up.”
The dramatic dismissal of the case against Mr. Baldwin prompted the movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, to ask for a new trial; she was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in March and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
It was the third day of Mr. Baldwin’s manslaughter trial at the Santa Fe County District Courthouse when his lawyers sought the dismissal of the case over the state’s failure to provide it with live ammunition that came from a man named Troy Teske, a friend of Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s stepfather, Thell Reed, who is a well-known Hollywood armorer.
The previous day, a crime scene technician for the state, Marissa Poppell, testified that she had spoken to Mr. Teske and saved the ammunition, but that she had put it under a different case number than the “Rust” case. She also testified that the ammunition did not resemble the live rounds discovered on the “Rust” set.
The defense’s request led to an extraordinary hearing in which Judge Marlowe Sommer examined the live ammunition — determining that several rounds did, in fact, resemble the ones on the “Rust” set — and Ms. Morrissey called herself as a witness to defend the state’s handling of the evidence. The other special prosecutor in the case, Erlinda O. Johnson, resigned that day, saying she felt that her voice had not been heard about how to proceed after the evidence issues came to light.
“The state’s willful withholding of this information was intentional and deliberate,” Judge Marlowe Sommer said as she dismissed the case, noting that the events meant the defense was “not in a position to test the state’s theory as to the source of the live rounds.”
Ms. Morrissey, who took over the “Rust” prosecutions after the local district attorney stepped back, wrote in the court filing that Ms. Poppell’s inaccurate testimony about the ammunition did not indicate that evidence had been intentionally suppressed.
“Human beings make mistakes — it does not mean they are lying or that they intentionally buried evidence as claimed by the defense,” she wrote.
During the July court proceedings, the lead detective who investigated the case testified that Ms. Morrissey had been present for the decision to put the evidence under a different case number. Ms. Morrissey denied in the court filing that she participated in any decision regarding the case number and wrote that she had been under the impression that the report on the new evidence would be “somehow linked to the ‘Rust’ case number.”
Ms. Morrissey also alleged in her filing that Mr. Baldwin’s team had been aware of the ammunition but strategically ignored it until the trial; she asked the actor’s defense to turn over all documents related to how and when they learned of the ammunition.
If the judge declines to reconsider her decision, the prosecution will still have the opportunity to appeal to a higher court.
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