A judge in New Mexico declined on Monday to grant a new trial to the armorer in the fatal “Rust” shooting, who had accused the prosecution of suppressing evidence.
The armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, is serving an 18-month prison sentence and had asked to be retried on an involuntary manslaughter charge in New Mexico after the same judge dismissed the case against Alec Baldwin during his trial in July. Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer found then that the state had withheld evidence that could have shed light on how live rounds got onto the film set.
On the afternoon of Oct. 21, 2021, Mr. Baldwin was positioning the old-fashioned revolver for a tight camera framing when the weapon discharged, killing the movie’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounding its director. A jury convicted Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, who loaded the gun that day, of manslaughter in March after prosecutors argued that she was reckless in overseeing guns and ammunitions on the set.
Judge Marlowe Sommer ruled on Monday that the suppressed evidence that felled the Baldwin case — a set of ammunition that was delivered to law enforcement on the day of the armorer’s conviction — had not threatened the integrity of Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s trial.
The ruling was a moment of relief for the prosecution after its case against Mr. Baldwin, 66, collapsed under accusations from his lawyers that state investigators had intentionally withheld the ammunition from them by putting it under a new case number. The accusation led to an extraordinary hearing in which the judge examined the ammunition in the courtroom; the lead special prosecutor, Kari T. Morrissey, called herself as a witness; and the other prosecutor on her team resigned.
Lawyers for Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, who is incarcerated at the Western New Mexico Correctional Facility, sought to use the dismissal of Mr. Baldwin’s case to their own advantage, arguing that the suppression of several pieces of evidence had unfairly disadvantaged their client.
“This pattern of discovery abuse occurred in Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s case in the same manner as it did in Mr. Baldwin’s case,” Jason Bowles, one of the armorer’s lawyers, said at a hearing last week.
Ms. Morrissey has vehemently defended her handling of both cases, denying that there had been any intentional withholding of evidence. She has said the ammunition was not at all central to jurors’ consideration of whether either defendant was criminally responsible for Ms. Hutchins’s death.
“It was still Ms. Gutierrez’s job to inspect the rounds and ensure that all rounds put in the gun for the rehearsal were inert,” Ms. Morrissey wrote in court papers. “She failed at this simple task, and it resulted in someone’s death.”
The ammunition in question was delivered to the local sheriff’s office on March 6, 2024, by a man named Troy Teske, a retired police officer and a friend of Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s stepfather, Thell Reed, a well-known Hollywood armorer. Mr. Teske told law enforcement he believed that the rounds were related to the “Rust” set.
Ms. Morrissey has said she had determined from photos that the ammunition in Mr. Teske’s possession had no evidentiary value because none of the rounds appeared to match the type recovered from the “Rust” set, where five other live rounds were discovered after the weapon discharged. But when Judge Marlowe Sommer put on blue gloves and examined the rounds in the courtroom, three of them looked similar to the “Rust” rounds.
The first time she realized there were similarities, Ms. Morrissey has said, was in court that day. After Mr. Baldwin’s case was dismissed, the prosecutor noted in court papers that it was “highly suspect” that matching rounds had suddenly emerged after months of investigation.
She has also underscored that Mr. Bowles had been well aware of the rounds because Mr. Teske, who was on the defense’s witness list but was not called to testify, had offered them to Mr. Bowles first. He declined to take them, saying at a court hearing that he did not want to be accused of improperly handling evidence.
“These rounds were in the possession of his witness,” Ms. Morrissey said at the hearing. “He told his witness to bring them to court. He got to look at them.”
Judge Marlowe Sommer agreed, writing that the defendant “cannot establish that the Teske-supplied ammunition is material to her defense given that the ammunition was available to her through her own witness at the time other trial.”
Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s lawyers also argued that there were other pieces of suppressed evidence that warranted a new trial, including a firearm forensic report and an interview with the main supplier of guns and ammunition for the movie. But the judge was not convinced.
During Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s trial, prosecutors laid out evidence that they said proved she had brought the live ammunition onto the set. She has denied doing so, and her lawyers have asserted that the state had not properly investigated other possible sources for the live ammunition.
The prosecution and defense have continued to tangle in legal filings over the dismissal of Mr. Baldwin’s case. Ms. Morrissey has asked Judge Marlowe Sommer to reconsider her decision to toss out the manslaughter charge, arguing that Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers had misled the judge on the importance of the Teske ammunition to his case.
The post ‘Rust’ Armorer Is Denied New Trial After Dismissal of Alec Baldwin’s Case appeared first on New York Times.
