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By all accounts, it was an accident everyone saw coming, but the questions and chaos surrounding the October 2021 death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins while filming the Alec Baldwin movie Rust have only grown more numerous in the years since the fatal incident. Now, thanks to a stunning act of prosecutorial misconduct that led the judge overseeing Baldwin’s trial for manslaughter to completely throw out the case, we may never know the answers.
The nearly three-year saga reached an extraordinary conclusion on Friday afternoon when Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer, presiding over the trial in New Mexico, halted the trial mid-testimony and dismissed the case against Baldwin “with prejudice” — meaning he can never be retried.
The move came after the prosecution took the stand in a special hearing to admit deliberately concealing evidence from the defense. And not just any evidence — evidence pertaining to one of the central mysteries of the case: How did live rounds of ammunition make it onto the set?
The prosecution, which was headed by a special team assigned by the state to handle this case, testified not only to deliberately withholding the evidence from the defense but also to concealing it. The court heard testimony Friday afternoon that prosecutors misfiled the evidence with a different case number altogether, allegedly so that the defense wouldn’t be able to easily locate it.
Judge Sommer stated in her decision that “The late discovery of this evidence during trial has impeded the effective use of evidence in such a way that it has impacted the fundamental fairness of the proceedings,” and that “there is no way for the court to right this wrong.” Dismissal, she said, was “the only warranted remedy.”
The court’s decision not only immediately freed Baldwin, who burst into tears at the news, but could also exonerate fellow defendant in the case, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed. Gutierrez-Reed, the chief weapons handler for the film, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter on March 6, 2024 and sentenced to 18 months in prison for her controversial role in Hutchins’ shooting. Following Friday’s decision, her defense team immediately set about seeking her release.
So what happened here?
The new evidence might have provided answers to a longstanding mystery. But we’ll never know now.
Baldwin’s trial was shaping up to be one of the most high-profile courtroom dramas in years. Prior to its commencement, multiple networks announced that they would be streaming every minute online to thousands of eager trial watchers. What those onlookers received, instead of a glitzy celebrity drama, however, was an abrupt look at how a criminal prosecution can go completely off the rails.
On Thursday, Baldwin’s defense questioned a prosecution witness, a crime scene technician, about evidence supplied by a new witness, a former Arizona police officer named Troy Teske. Teske, who is a close friend of Gutierrez-Reed’s stepfather, had come forward to police both during and again after Gutierrez-Reed’s trial to drop off ammunition that he claimed matched the live rounds used on set.
During her trial, the prosecution had strongly implied that Gutierrez-Reed brought the live rounds to the set in a state of cocaine-addled confusion or negligence, but no one has ever been able to definitively explain how the bullets wound up on location. Early on, investigators speculated that Gutierrez-Reed might have accidentally purchased live rounds from the production’s gun supplier, PDQ Arm and Prop LLC. But Gutierrez-Reed has alleged since a 2021 lawsuit she filed against him that PDQ’s owner, Seth Kenney, deliberately mixed live ammunition into the dummy rounds. She claimed this was part of an effort to discredit her due to a personal grudge involving previous accidental on-set discharges.
That’s a claim her defense, and Baldwin’s, could have used to support their version of events — and this new bullet evidence could have potentially strengthened that argument. According to the motion to dismiss filed by Baldwin’s lawyers, the new evidence suggests “that the live round came from Seth Kenney.” The motion also claims that the state “had been aware and had access to Teske for years” without alerting either of the defense teams to his evidence. On the witness stand Thursday, the crime scene technician admitted to knowing about Teske and the bullets. This confession prompted the defense to file the motion and request the hearing which subsequently took place Friday.
Granted, it’s unclear if there’s any connection between Teske’s bullets and the bullets that made it into the gun that day on set, but the problem is that the defense teams never had a chance to find out. The prosecution claimed it had done nothing wrong, but there was dissension in the ranks; one special prosecutor, Erlinda Johnson, actually resigned in protest Friday, later claiming she had done so because she felt the state should have dropped the case before the hearing even began.
The other special prosecutor, Kari Morrissey, described as “exasperated” by Deadline, testified on the stand Friday that she had personally decided that there was no link between Teske’s bullets and the Rust set. “I could see it was not at all similar to the live rounds on the set of Rust so I made the decision not to collect the rounds,” she stated.
“This is a wild goose chase that has no evidentiary value whatsoever,” she further insisted. “This is just a man trying to protect his daughter” — in reference to Teske’s close friendship with Gutierrez-Reed’s stepfather Thell Reed.
The law, however, is quite clear on this point: It’s not up to the prosecution to make that decision. They’re required to turn over all evidence in a case to the defense, period.
This case unexpectedly gives us insight into one of the most egregious — yet common — forms of criminal misconduct there is
Under US law, deliberately concealing evidence from the defense is one of the worst things a prosecution can do. It’s known as a Brady violation, and it’s considered a very serious act of prosecutorial misconduct.
In a criminal proceeding, the police work directly with the prosecutors office while they’re investigating a case and turn over all their evidence directly to them. That means that any defense team must rely on the prosecution to be honest and thorough and turn over all of the evidence in an investigation to them before trial. The integrity of the justice system itself relies upon the prosecution handing over evidence to the defense. Withholding any evidence from them is such a serious offense that — when it’s uncovered — it routinely leads to trials like this one being halted, and to verdicts being overturned.
What’s truly shocking is how frequently Brady violations occur, despite their seriousness and despite how clear-cut the law is about their illegality. But the attitude of the prosecution in this case illustrates why and how it happens. Simply put, with the prosecutor controlling most of the evidence, they sometimes think that they can decide on their own what evidence does and doesn’t matter. They can choose to “bury” evidence, for example slipping it into an enormous case file but not actually notifying the defense of its significance, in the hopes that the defense won’t independently find it. Or, even worse, they can proactively hide the evidence, which the defense alleges is what happened to Baldwin and Gutierrez-Reed when the prosecution misfiled Teske’s evidence with a different case number, as though it were part of some other case altogether.
Essentially, Brady violations, whether they happen intentionally or not, expose serious flaws in the criminal justice system. They’re a leading cause of wrongful convictions, and they can wreak havoc on even the most carefully constructed criminal trial.
The case against Baldwin has arguably never been carefully constructed; at one point charges against him were dropped only to be reinstated later. Just days before trial commenced, Judge Sommer threw a wrench in the prosecution’s case when she forbade them from introducing his role as a producer on set into their arguments. His role as a producer — on a set fraught with production mismanagement and arguable mistreatment of staff — would likely have been more damning than the claims the prosecution went to trial with. Instead, they were left arguing that Baldwin intentionally pulled the trigger when he handled the gun on October 21, 2021 as Hutchins was filming. Baldwin has always maintained he never pulled the trigger and that the gun fired on its own.
Meanwhile, Gutierrez-Reed’s supporters have long argued that she had been scapegoated for stressful on-set conditions engendered by the film’s producers; after all, she reportedly spent the weeks leading up to the shooting warning her supervisors of unsafe conditions while seeking — and being denied — more opportunities to attend to gun safety. She’s been serving her sentence since April, but could have her conviction overturned as a result of the facts uncovered by Friday’s hearing.
Hutchins’s husband Matthew Hutchins had settled with producers in connection with her death, but recently re-opened the suit after the Rust production team failed to make the settlement payouts to the family. In a statement after Friday’s courtroom events, the family’s lawyer indicated they would be pursuing civil action against Baldwin. “We respect the court’s decision. We look forward to presenting all the evidence to a jury and holding Mr. Baldwin accountable for his actions in the senseless death of Halyna Hutchins,” Hutchins’ lawyer Brian Panish said in a statement.
The new decision comes after nearly three years of twists in a confusing case
Santa Fe District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies announced exactly a year ago that the county would bring charges against Baldwin and Gutierrez-Reed for the cinematographer’s death. Hutchins was killed in October 2021 on a ranch near Santa Fe, after a prop gun Baldwin was holding accidentally discharged. The film’s director, Joel Souza, was also non-fatally injured in the shooting.
Baldwin was formally charged, but prosecutors soon dropped all charges against him. Yet the charges were dropped without prejudice, meaning prosecutors could still choose to refile them or file different charges against Baldwin in the future. Prosecutors claimed to have dropped and subsequently refiled the charges in January 2024 only because they had new forensic evidence regarding the gun Baldwin fired — a Pietta replica of a .45 Long Colt that seems to be the other central figure in this case. Baldwin has long maintained that he never pulled the trigger, but a new forensics report published in August claimed, in an apparent contradiction of previous tests on the prop, that he must have.
On the strength of that new report, the prosecution revived the case against Baldwin. Prior to Friday’s dismissal, he faced up to 18 months in prison. Baldwin’s lawyers responded by saying, “We look forward to our day in court.”
The back-and-forth prosecution followed an already lengthy investigation into the incident by the Santa Fe sheriff’s office that concluded in October 2022. The report, which was crucial in prosecutors’ initial decision to file charges, focused on lapses in safety procedures on the film’s highly criticized set, though it failed to determine the most important factor — exactly how loaded guns with live ammunition made it onto the set. Even after the end of Baldwin’s trial, this issue remains unsettled despite numerous investigations and lawsuits surrounding the production environment on the Rust set.
The assignment of blame has also proved elusive on a set plagued by claims of labor exploitation, rushed work, unsafe conditions, and “very fast and loose” handling of weaponry.
What happened on the Rust set?
No one disputes the broad facts of what happened on October 21, 2021. Prior to the filming of the scene, Gutierrez-Reed, a props assistant who doubled as the on-set armorer, examined the gun. She looked inside the barrel, spun the barrel, visually confirmed what she believed were dummy bullets — fake bullets containing no live ammunition — and handed the gun over to assistant director and production safety coordinator David Halls to take to the filming location. (Halls avoided facing trial by pleading guilty to negligent use of a deadly weapon.)
Safety protocol calls for Gutierrez-Reed to have checked all the bullets in front of Baldwin herself — and she claims to have intended to do so, asking Halls to let her know if Baldwin required her to come down to the filming location and directly examine the gun. But according to a lawsuit later filed by Gutierrez-Reed, the gun wasn’t actually intended to be used in that afternoon’s filming, and Halls was just “sitting in” with it, keeping it in case it became necessary for later use — which it did when Baldwin decided to rehearse an unscheduled scene that required the gun.
At that point, Halls should have summoned Gutierrez-Reed to come back and further examine the bullets inside the gun. Instead, he yelled, “Cold gun!” — “cold” meaning a gun that was not loaded with live ammunition — to warn the crew that a gun was about to be discharged. Then he handed it over to Baldwin. While Baldwin was following Hutchins’s instructions to aim the gun toward the camera, the gun discharged, striking both her and Souza.
Baldwin has always been adamant that he never pulled the trigger, one of the central questions of the case. He has explained that he would never pull the trigger on a prop gun while it was pointed at another human (though safety protocols forbid pointing any prop gun at any human for any reason), and that the gun discharged independently.
He instead claims he cocked the gun — that is, he pulled the hammer back — and that when he released it, the gun suddenly discharged on its own. Later, FBI forensics reports on the same gun apparently contradicted Baldwin, suggesting that this particular prop gun could only be discharged by pulling the trigger after the gun was cocked or partially cocked.
Yet those reports, according to Baldwin’s attorney, downplayed the fact that FBI investigators tried repeatedly to discharge it and were unable to do so, either by pulling the trigger or through any other means. “The gun fired in testing only one time — without having to pull the trigger — when the hammer was pulled back and the gun broke in two different places,” attorney Luke Nikas stated. “The FBI was unable to fire the gun in any prior test, even when pulling the trigger, because it was in such poor condition.”
The early 2024 forensics report seems highly contestable from the outset because, again, the gun fell apart after the one and only time the FBI was able to get it to fire. In order to conduct testing, the prosecution’s latest forensics expert, Lucien Haag, had to replace the broken gun parts, so his analysis was not based on the gun’s exact condition at the time of the shooting.
Haag’s testing found that the gun, with replaced parts, was unable to discharge without at least two pounds of pressure being exerted to pull the trigger. He also cited the seemingly careless way Baldwin tended to place his fingers near the triggers of guns as evidence that he could have fired the gun.
The assumption that Baldwin must have unsafely handled the weapon partially led Hutchins’s family to file a lawsuit against him in February 2022. That suit named Baldwin, Gutierrez-Reed, the ammo supplier, and a litany of Rust producers but took as its primary claim the allegation that Baldwin “recklessly shot and killed Halyna Hutchins,” and that he along with the staff had “failed to perform industry standard safety checks and follow basic gun safety rules while using real guns to produce the movie Rust, with fatal consequences.” Baldwin filed his own lawsuit in November 2022 against Gutierrez-Reed and the Rust producers, alleging that they were culpable for handing him a loaded gun to begin with.
And he has a point: If the gun had contained blanks when discharged — if it had actually been a “cold” gun when Halls handed it over to Baldwin — Hutchins would still be alive.
So how did a gun filled with live ammunition make it onto the set? That’s the question that might never be answered, thanks to prosecutorial misconduct.
Hutchins’s death was part of a disastrous working environment
Most of the public information about the conditions on the Rust set comes from a report completed in April 2022 by the New Mexico Occupational Health & Safety Bureau (OHSB). As a result of the OHSB’s investigation, the agency fined Rust about $137,000 for workplace safety violations, the maximum amount allowed under state law.
The OHSB report found multiple problems with Rust’s on-set production environment, concluding that the production “demonstrated plain indifference to the safety of employees … failed to follow company safety procedures, which likely would have prevented the accident from occurring … [and] “did not ensure their own safety procedures [were] followed at the worksite.” The OHSB also castigated specific producers for ignoring their employees’ repeatedly voiced concerns about on-set safety, and rushing the employees who were tasked with ensuring that safety. One employee who voiced concerns and was overridden was Gutierrez-Reed.
“Hannah was tasked with doing two jobs including props assistant and the very important job as armorer but not given adequate time and training days to do so,” Gutierrez-Reed’s attorney told ABC News, “despite repeated requests or the respect required of the armorer’s position and responsibilities.”
Indeed, a week before the shooting, Rust’s line producer, Gabrielle Pickle, emailed Gutierrez-Reed to reprimand her for spending too much time on her armory duties — which included inspecting all weapons to ensure their safety — and not enough on her other duties as prop assistant. Gutierrez-Reed replied that “since we’ve started I’ve had a lot of days where my job should only be to focus on the guns and everyone’s safety,” and that “there are working guns on set every day and those are ultimately going to be a priority because when they are not that’s when dangerous mistakes can happen.”
According to the OHSB report, there were two other accidental discharges on set, both on October 16, five days before the incident that killed Hutchins. (In her lawsuit against Kenney, Gutierrez-Reed claimed that her criticism of the production’s primary prop manager for his role in these discharges then motivated the prop manager to conspire with Kenney to effectively set her up.)
A third dangerous incident involved a special effects explosive device accidentally exploding. It was partly in response to these incidents that one of Hutchins’s camera assistants, Lane Luper, quit the job the day before Hutchins’s death — citing rampant safety violations in his resignation email, among many other exploitative work conditions.
Another crew member, Jonas Huerta, also resigned the same day, again citing exploitative, unsafe, and rushed working conditions. “I also feel anxious on set,” he wrote in his resignation email. “I’ve seen first hand our AD [the assistant director, Halls] rush to get shots and he skips over important protocols.”
The reinstated criminal charges related to Baldwin seem to involve his specific act in handling the weapon, rather than his broader role as one of the film’s producers. But the lack of charges filed against any of the other producers on set, several of whom more directly oversaw the frazzled, unsafe filming conditions that led to the multiple accidental weapons discharges, is puzzling. The OHSB report criticized specific producers, including head producer Ryan Smith, for failing to take workplace safety concerns seriously despite repeated complaints by staff. Pickle also faced scrutiny for actively scolding Gutierrez-Reed, including ordering her off armorer duty and limiting her time spent training the cast and crew on how to safely handle weapons.
It seems baffling, given this type of evidence, that Santa Fe prosecutors opted not to bring charges of negligence against the producers — charges that seem clearly provable according to the available evidence. The initial charges of involuntary manslaughter against Baldwin and Gutierrez-Reed seemed much harder to prove given how confused their roles were.
What does seem clear is that, on this set and likely on many others, Gutierrez-Reed was one of countless crew members who were underpaid, overworked, harangued by equally frazzled supervisors, and pushed to cut corners to save money and time. Five days before Hutchins’s death, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) narrowly avoided an employee strike in response to pervasive exploitative conditions throughout Hollywood, including the prevalence of minimum wage gigs, stretched workers, strenuous labor conditions, and wide gender gaps in pay rates and opportunities.
Hutchins’s death, as tragic as it is, seems to be the latest culmination of terrible working conditions found not just on set but throughout the industry. The advent of streaming media, the strain of supplying content in a post-pandemic world, and a widespread culture of demanding tireless work for little pay all contribute to the kind of callous disregard for safety and for employees that resulted in the Rust working environment.
And while unionization efforts are bringing some meaningful change to the industry, Hutchins’s death arguably stands as a far greater indictment of the industry as a whole than individual indictments against Rust’s on-set players could ever be.
Update, July 13, 2024, 12:10 pm ET: This story was originally published on January 23, 2023, and has been updated multiple times, most recently to reflect the dismissal of the case against Alec Baldwin.
