Alec Baldwin’s involuntary manslaughter charge has been thrown out by a judge over the mishandling of evidence by the Santa Fe prosecutors, which the actor’s attorneys said had harmed their efforts at mounting a fair defense. The 30 Rock and Hunt for Red October star will now not face trial for the on-set shooting during the making of the western drama Rust that ended the life of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounded writer-director Joel Souza.
The movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, had already been found guilty in March for loading a live round of ammunition into the gun Baldwin used during the rehearsal for a scene in October 2021. The film’s assistant director, Dave Halls, accepted a plea bargain for negligent use of a deadly weapon in January 2023. He was the person who handed Baldwin the gun Gutierrez had loaded, and investigators said he had declared it a “cold” weapon, indicating it had no live ammunition in it.
There was ongoing debate about Baldwin’s responsibility—or lack thereof—for Hutchins’ death, since the armorer was responsible for prepping the prop gun, and the assistant director was responsible for safety checks. (Significant false information about the case, including that crew members had been using the prop guns for target practice, spread online during the investigation, but the live round’s arrival on the set turned out to be the result of simple carelessness on the part of Gutierrez Reed, as her jury trial eventually determined.) The actor’s role as a producer on Rust complicated the issue of responsibility; he said it was a title that only involved creative input, while others handled the hiring and management of crew. In a combative interview with ABC News, Baldwin denied even pulling the trigger, which seemed dubious to some viewers.
Charges against him were filed, then dropped again, then refiled as experts changed their assessment of whether the gun could have gone off on its own. Ultimately, prosecutors felt the weapon could only have been fired through some action by Baldwin, and they moved forward with charges against him—although the question of whether he should be blamed for the actions of others that put the deadly object in his hands remained up for debate. Vanity Fair‘s own investigation into the case, “Event Cascade,” determined that there were multiple points of failure during the production that led to the fatal incident.
The proceedings against Baldwin began this week in Santa Fe, but before it could actually get underway the trial came to an abrupt end on Friday over an envelope full of ammunition that had been supplied to prosecutors by an associate of Gutierrez Reed’s father, Thell Reed, a longtime movie armorer himself. The exact nature of the bullets and their connection to the case were unclear, but the fact that prosecutors had mislabeled the objects and filed them under case number for another trial were enough for Baldwin’s lawyers to call for the case to be dismissed, since they were unable to assess the supposed evidence. Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer agreed and tossed out the case with prejudice, which means it cannot be refiled against him. Baldwin openly wept in court after the decision.
The 42-year-old Hutchins left behind a husband and young son. Her career as a cinematographer was just beginning to take off, and she posted frequently on social media during the making of Rust about her passion for the western saga, in which Baldwin plays an aging gunslinger who is determined to stop the hanging execution of a young boy who, in a morbidly ironic twist, accidentally kills someone with a firearm. Her husband, Matthew, reached a settlement with the production that involved him becoming an executive producer, and the movie was ultimately finished, with Souza returning to the emotionally charged project to complete their work.
A new cinematographer stepped in to help finish the project, while preserving as much of Hutchins’ final work as possible. The status of the film—when it will be screened or released publicly—remains unclear.