Alec Baldwin Denied Bid to Dismiss ‘Rust’ Manslaughter Charge Over ‘Destroyed’ Gun
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Alec Baldwin lost his bid to dismiss his involuntary manslaughter indictment Friday when a New Mexico judge ruled he still must face trial even though the FBI damaged the gun involved in the shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
In an 18-page ruling issued Friday, Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer wrote that “a significant amount of evidence indicates that the unaltered firearm did not possess apparent exculpatory value” before it was damaged in forensic testing months after the fatal shooting. She specifically pointed to statements Baldwin made to a New Mexico Occupational Health and Safety Bureau Officer in which he stated, “The problem didn’t have to do with the gun. It had to do with the bullet.”
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Importantly, Judge Marlowe Sommer ruled that they saw no evidence that investigators or prosecutors knew the gun possessed possible “exculpatory” value before an FBI technician started whacking it with a rawhide mallet. “The court concludes that defendant fails to establish that the state acted in bad faith when destroying certain internal components of the firearm in the course of accidental discharge testing,” the judge wrote.
She ruled that once Baldwin’s trial begins next month in Santa Fe, prosecutors will be required to “disclose the destructive nature of the testing, the resulting loss and its relevance.” Baldwin then will be able to cross-examine the state witnesses to set forth his theory that the gun may have been modified before the shooting and may have been defective.
Baldwin and his lawyers argued in their underlying dismissal motion that the “extremely aggressive” tests performed on the gun in an FBI lab irreversibly damaged the single-action revolver and thereby “deprived” the actor of any chance to test a “core component” of his defense. They claim the firearm already was defective when the deadly accident occurred on Oct. 21, 2021. The controversial FBI tests involved a rawhide mallet striking the gun repeatedly from different directions to see if it would fire without someone pulling the trigger. The testing was meant to evaluate Baldwin’s claim the gun simply “went off” and fired the fatal shot on the set of the western movie Rust without a trigger pull. The FBI tests ultimately fractured the trigger sear. Prosecutors say the tests also shaved off the full-cock notch of the gun’s hammer.
Baldwin’s lawyers argued during a recent two-day hearing that it’s impossible to determine how defective the gun may have been before the “destructive” testing because it wasn’t disassembled to document the internal components ahead of time. They argued the mallet testing made “no sense” because no witness ever claimed the gun was dropped or hit with “blunt force” before it fired. Prosecutors countered that they only authorized the mallet testing after the FBI completed its core battery of tests and reported that the gun functioned normally upon arrival, meaning it wouldn’t fire from a cocked position absent a trigger pull.
According to Baldwin and his lawyers, the mallet testing “so thoroughly demolished the gun” that prosecutors had to hire experts to replace several internal components for follow-up analysis. They said New Mexico investigators were warned the mallet testing would most likely damage the gun, but they failed to ask the FBI to document the original condition of the internal components and failed to alert Baldwin that “a key item of evidence was about to be destroyed.”
“This is some of the most egregious conduct with respect to the destruction of evidence you will find,” defense lawyer John Bash argued to the court Monday. “They got to do all their own analysis of the gun, and we never got to do it – and will never get to do it,” Bash said. “No one cared about the rights of the defendant.”
While prosecutors have alleged the gun was in “perfect working order” before the mallet testing because it test-fired 12 times without incident and because Baldwin told investigators it showed no mechanical defects leading up to the deadly shooting, Bash argued that the testing was inadequate. “We all know that when machines don’t work correctly, they’re not not working correctly every single time. I had a key that one out of every 10 times, it wouldn’t turn my lock. The other nine times, it worked fine. Sometimes these things happen randomly, if it’s hit at a certain angle.” He said the defense was denied access to “potentially exculpatory” evidence in an “outrageous” violation of due process. “There’s clear bad faith,” he said.
In testimony last Friday, FBI forensic examiner Bryce Ziegler told the court that he conducted the 12 test firings and found that the prop gun — a real revolver made to look like a 19th-century Colt revolver by Pietta Firearms in Italy — functioned normally upon arrival at his FBI lab. He described specifically testing to make sure the gun wouldn’t simply fire if his thumb slipped off the hammer. He said the “notches” that catch the hammer in the half-cock and quarter-cock positions properly engaged, meaning they stopped the hammer from hitting the firing pin, absent a trigger pull. There were no issues with the hammer “falling just on its own,” he told the court. “I wasn’t noticing any of those types of failures in the condition it was received,” Ziegler testified under oath. “There was nothing odd or abnormal about this during the initial test firing.”
Ziegler said that even if the gun had been modified before it ended up on the set of the movie, the modifications had no impact on the gun’s performance. “Even If the (defense) hypothesis is true – let’s say hypothetically this gun was modified in some fashion – it had no effect on its function in the condition that I received it,” Ziegler testified.
The court also heard testimony from Lucien Haag, the private forensics expert hired by New Mexico prosecutors to test the gun after it left the FBI lab. Baldwin’s defense has argued that the replica revolver showed “telltale signs” of post-production modifications. “Critically, the full-cock notch of the hammer is almost completely gone, and the trigger sear appears to have been filed. Those two parts are primarily what prevents a gun from firing when the hammer is released after cocking. The surviving evidence shows that those parts were smoothed and rounded and show file marks – none of which is consistent with damage caused by a mallet,” the lawyers wrote in a May 6 court filing.
In his testimony last Friday and Monday, Haag said that while he once believed it was “unlikely” that the mallet impact testing caused the diagonal markings on the broken trigger sear, he later learned more about the FBI’s testing “methodology” and changed his opinion. He told the court he now believes the “freehand” blows, which were “not necessarily perfect back to front,” caused the markings. “It’s really the only choice, just by simple logic and the history of the gun,” Haag said. Furthermore, he testified under oath that even if the strange markings weren’t caused by the FBI and existed during filming of the movie, they “would not” have affected the functionality of the gun. Haag added that his analysis of the spent casing for the bullet that killed Hutchins led him to conclude that the cartridge fired based on “a normal hammer fall from a full cocked position, as opposed to a slip off.”
Baldwin, 66, is scheduled to begin trial in Santa Fe on July 9. He’s accused of negligently pointing the replica revolver at Hutchins and pulling the trigger, striking her in the chest during a rehearsal inside a wooden church at the Bonanza Creek Ranch, a popular western set in the foothills of northern New Mexico.
Baldwin has pleaded not guilty, claiming he’s not responsible for the deadly shooting because he wasn’t in charge of safety for the movie, had no reason to suspect live rounds were on its set, and didn’t pull the trigger on his .45 caliber single action army revolver. In a prior failed dismissal motion, Baldwin and his lawyers argued that the person who handed him the Colt revolver before the fatal shooting shouted “cold gun” to signify “it was loaded with inert dummy rounds and therefore safe to handle.” He has claimed it was Hutchins herself who directed him to draw the gun from its holster and aim it toward the camera. “Hutchins, like Baldwin, clearly believed that the gun was cold. Had there been any doubts between them, she would not have instructed him to point the gun in her direction, and he would not have done so,” his lawyers wrote in a filing.
Last Friday, Judge Marlowe Sommer denied yet another attempt by Baldwin to sink his manslaughter indictment based on his argument that there’s no way to show the level of negligence needed to support an involuntary manslaughter charge. Judge Marlowe Sommer said the question of whether Baldwin “should have known” his actions might be dangerous was the critical question that jurors will be asked to decide.
In court filings, prosecutors have argued that Baldwin was the most experienced person on the Rust set and was presiding over a production with a string of safety lapses. “Mr. Baldwin’s relentless rushing of the crew on the movie set routinely compromised safety because Rust is not a romantic comedy, it is an action-filled western with dangerous stunts and real guns being used as props,” they wrote. “In addition to rushing the cast and crew, Mr. Baldwin was frequently screaming and cursing at himself, at crew members or at no one and not for any particular reason. To watch Mr. Baldwin’s conduct on the set of Rust is to witness a man who has absolutely no control of his own emotions and absolutely no concern for how his conduct effects those around him.”
Beyond Baldwin, the western film’s rookie armorer also faced criminal prosecution for Hutchins’ death. Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was convicted of involuntary manslaughter at a 10-day trial that ended in March. In their closing arguments, prosecutors told jurors that Gutierrez-Reed negligently brought live ammunition onto the set and failed to identify that it was mixed in with the inert, dummy rounds that she was loading into prop weapons. Six live bullets were eventually found on the production, including the live round that killed Hutchins. Two others were found loose on top of a prop cart while one was found in Baldwin’s holster belt and another was found in actor Jensen Ackles’ gun belt.
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