(LibertySociety.com) – On July 12, First Judicial District Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer dismissed the involuntary manslaughter case against Alec Baldwin, 66, with prejudice.
Baldwin was facing charges of involuntary manslaughter related to the fatal shooting of Halyna Hutchins, 42, in 2021 on the set of the film “Rust.” Hutchins was killed and director Joel Souza was injured when the gun Baldwin was holding while rehearsing a scene fired a live round.
On the fourth day of the trial, defense attorney Luke Nikas accused the prosecution of withholding evidence related to the source of the live ammunition being linked to the prop distributor Seth Kenney. Prosecutor Kari Morrissey’s co-counsel, Erlinda Ocampo Johnson, then resigned, prompting the judge to dismiss the jury and hold a hearing where Morrissey called herself to the stand as a witness. During her testimony, Morrissey stated she did not believe the evidence, which came from former Arizona police officer Troy Teske, was favorable to the defense since the ammunition in question was not a match to the ammunition on the movie set and had not left the state of Arizona before the shooting in New Mexico.
However, during the trial of armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed, convicted of loading a live round into a revolver, Teske testified that he delivered a collection of rounds from Kenney to crime scene technician Marissa Poppell, who noted that they were a match to the ammunition that killed Hutchins.
According to Poppell’s testimony on July 8, she inventoried the evidence she received from Teske under a different case number instead of the “Rust” case. Therefore, the defense never received a supplemental report for the new evidence.
The information led Sommer to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning the charges against Baldwin cannot be filed again, after Sommer’s ruling that the prosecution had concealed evidence related to the shooting from the defense.
Sommer stated that the “state’s willful withholding” of the evidence in the case “was intentional and deliberate,” noting that the court could not “right this wrong.”
After the dismissal, Morrissey stated that “the importance of the evidence was misconstrued” by Baldwin’s defense team.
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