The judge dismissed the charges of involuntary manslaughter against Alec Baldwin on Friday, hours after his lawyers alleged that police and prosecutors concealed evidence related to the live bullet that killed him Rust camera operator Halyna Hutchins in 2021. It is a stunning turn of events, coming just two days after testimony in the criminal case began.
“The late discovery of this evidence at trial so impeded the effective use of evidence that it affected the fundamental fairness of the proceedings,” Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer told the court. “If this conduct does not rise to the level of bad faith, it certainly comes so close to bad faith that it shows signs of scorching.”
The dismissal was with prejudice, meaning the prosecution cannot retry Baldwin’s involuntary manslaughter case. The 66-year-old actor sobbed in court as the decision was announced and hugged his wife, Hilaria Baldwin. He faced up to 18 months in prison if convicted.
Criminal defense attorney Lauren Johnson-Norris told Yahoo Entertainment she was “not surprised that this case ended up being a complete embarrassment for the prosecution.”
“Not only was their theory against Baldwin untenable, they withheld exonerating evidence in an attempt to convict him,” she explained. “The dismissal with prejudice ends this spectacle of a trial and I would expect Gutierrez-Reed to file a motion for a new trial Monday morning.”
The jury was sent home early Friday when Baldwin’s defense attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the case, accusing the prosecution of suppressing evidence. The judge heard testimony from multiple people before making a decision. At the heart of the case was ammunition brought to the sheriff’s office in March 2024. Hutchins was killed when a live round was fired from a gun Baldwin was rehearsing with. The actor’s team successfully argued that the state should have shared the evidence.
Before the ruling became official, Johnson-Norris told Yahoo that the prosecution faced an “uphill battle.”
The trial got off to a slow start on July 10, when the state began presenting its case. After Baldwin’s big victory on July 8, when Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer ruled that his role as producer was Rust could not be introduced into evidence, the state had to prove that actor Baldwin was guilty of the death of camerawoman Halyna Hutchins in 2021.
“They have to show that Baldwin was negligent in firing the gun while he was on set. This is problematic for the prosecution because the gunsmith who loaded the gun has a prior conviction for the same crime,” Johnson-Norris explained to Yahoo Entertainment. Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was in charge of weapons on set, has already been sentenced to 18 months in prison.
“[The prosecution] evidence brought forward to try to prove [Baldwin] was indifferent to what happened. But the question is whether he was negligent at the time of the shooting, and the evidence does not point to that,” Johnson-Norris continued.
“The prosecution has an ethical obligation to provide the defense with all exculpatory evidence. This ensures that trials are fair. The fact that prosecutors failed to inform Baldwin’s attorneys of this evidence may constitute misconduct,” she continued. “The fact that the judge dismissed the case with prejudice — meaning it cannot be refiled — is a result of those actions.”
Baldwin was charged with involuntary manslaughter, the same charge as Gutierrez-Reed, and faces the same maximum sentence. He was holding a .45-caliber revolver that fired a round of live ammunition that should never have been on set, killing Hutchins and wounding the film’s director, Joel Souza.
In his opening statement, Baldwin’s attorney Alex Spiro blamed others, including Gutierrez-Reed and first assistant director David Halls, who was in charge of security on the set, for not properly checking the gun before giving it to the actor.
Celebrity attorney Chris Melcher told Yahoo that the jury would have the “ultimate question”: whether it was “reasonable for someone to take someone else’s word that a gun is unloaded.”
The prosecution alleged that Baldwin routinely failed to perform security checks on the set of Rust with the “inexperienced” gunsmith on the set. They claimed he had “mishandled” the gun while rehearsing a scene for the western. Baldwin publicly maintained that he never pulled the trigger. The state called experts to testify that it was not possible for the gun to have gone off without the trigger being pulled. The gun was eventually damaged when the FBI tested it to determine if that was possible.
In June, Baldwin’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the case due to damage to the firearm during the test, but the motion was denied.
This story has been continuously updated to reflect that the case has been dismissed.
