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A New Mexico jury needed only two hours of deliberation Thursday to find Hannah Gutierrez-Reed guilty of involuntary manslaughter on the set of the film Rust in October 2021.
Gutierrez-Reed was the armorer responsible for the gun containing live ammunition that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
Perhaps nobody followed the outcome of the case more closely than actor Alec Baldwin, who was the film’s star and producer. His trial for involuntary manslaughter is slated to start in July. Jesse Weber is an anchor in the Law and Crime Network; he appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to discuss what fate awaits Baldwin as the film’s producer.
“If you followed this case from the beginning, [you’re] not surprised by that verdict,” Weber told Berman and Riedel. “It came down to responsibility and it came down to foreseeability, and the prosecution put on a terrific case that, even if she didn’t load the live rounds into the gun, which is what they asserted she did, she was the last line of defense. The reason you have an armorer on set, who should be there whenever a gun is being used, is to make sure these accidents don’t happen, and she didn’t do it.”
Now the courts can turn their attention to Baldwin’s trial. Weber says the evidence in the armorer’s trial disproves Baldwin’s version of the case.
“We heard about this ballistic evidence, which basically said there is no way, under the circumstances, that gun would be discharged unless you pulled the trigger. So, when Alec Baldwin went on ABC News and said he didn’t pull the trigger, that doesn’t look right. Then you have all of this footage of Alec Baldwin rushing through the production, criticizing the armorer, saying ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!’ pointing the gun in the wrong direction. Remember, he’s not just the actor, he’s the producer on the film, and there was testimony he wasn’t paying attention during the training rehearsal, so I think Alec Baldwin looked at that verdict yesterday and was concerned.”
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