A New Mexico judge upheld her decision to dismiss a manslaughter charge against Alec Baldwin in the shooting death of a cinematographer on the set of a Western movie.
In a ruling Thursday, state District Court Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer upheld her July decision to dismiss an involuntary manslaughter charge against Baldwin. He said prosecutors did not raise any factual or legal arguments that justified overturning their decision.
“Because the state’s amended motion raises previously filed arguments and arguments that the state chose not to raise earlier, the court does not find the amended motion well adopted,” the judge wrote, adding that the request was also untimely.
A spokesman for Baldwin’s attorneys said Friday they had no immediate reaction to the decision.
Special prosecutor Kari Morrissey told The Associated Press that she disagrees with the court’s analysis and will appeal the ruling. Morrissey was appointed by the Santa Fe district attorney to take over the case in March 2023 after a previous special prosecutor resigned following errors in filing the initial charges.
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The case was dismissed mid-trial over allegations that police and prosecutors withheld evidence from the defense about the 2021 death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the film’s set. Oxide.
Baldwin’s trial was upended by revelations that a man brought ammunition to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office in March and said it could be linked to Hutchins’ murder. Prosecutors said they considered the ammunition unrelated and unimportant, while Baldwin’s attorneys say investigators “buried” the evidence in a separate file and filed a successful motion to dismiss the case.
Baldwin, lead actor and co-producer of Oxidewas pointing a gun at Hutchins during a rehearsal for a film set outside Santa Fe in October 2021 when the revolver went off, killing Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza. Baldwin has said that he pulled the hammer, but not the trigger, and the revolver fired.
In April, a judge sentenced the film’s weapons supervisor Hannah Gutierrez-Reed to a maximum of a year and a half in a state penitentiary for a manslaughter conviction in Hutchins’ death.
Marlowe Sommer last month rejected Gutierrez-Reed’s request to throw out his conviction or hold a new trial over allegations that prosecutors failed to share evidence that could have been exculpatory. It found that the gunsmith’s attorneys did not establish that there was a reasonable possibility that the outcome of the trial would have been different if the evidence had been available to Gutierrez-Reed, who still has an appeal pending before a higher court.
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Associated Press reporter Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque contributed to this report.
© 2024 The Canadian Press
