The armorer who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for loading a live round into a gun on the “Rust” movie set, resulting in the fatal shooting of its cinematographer, asked a court in New Mexico on Tuesday for a new trial following the collapse of the case against Alec Baldwin.
On Friday, Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer halted Mr. Baldwin’s manslaughter trial and dismissed the case against him permanently after determining that the state had intentionally withheld new evidence that could have shed light on how live rounds ended up on the movie set, leading to the death of the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.
Now lawyers for the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, whose case was handled by the same prosecutor and who was sentenced to 18 months in prison by the same judge, are seizing on the problems exposed during Mr. Baldwin’s case to seek a new trial.
“This court stated on July 12 that the integrity of the judicial system demanded that the court dismiss Mr. Baldwin’s case with prejudice,” the lawyers wrote. “How can it be any different with Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s case, with this proven litany of serious discovery abuses?”
The dramatic dismissal of the case against Mr. Baldwin followed a hearing in which the judge herself examined the new evidence in the Santa Fe County District Courthouse: a batch of live rounds that someone had dropped off to the local sheriff’s office around the time the armorer’s trial ended in March.
Law enforcement officials acknowledged during testimony that when the ammunition was turned in, it was put in a separate case file from the rest of the “Rust” evidence. Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers said they had never received it despite asking the state for all ballistics evidence.
The new evidence does not apply to the armorer’s case in the same way that it did with Mr. Baldwin’s.
The man who turned the ammunition over to the sheriff’s office, Troy Teske, did so on the day that Ms. Gutierrez-Reed was convicted, meaning that the evidence had not been withheld ahead of her trial. And according to body-worn camera footage of Mr. Teske’s meeting with law enforcement, he said he had tried to give the ammunition over to her defense, but they had refused it.
Mr. Teske, who stored ammunition for Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s stepfather, a well-known Hollywood armorer, was on the defense’s witness list for the armorer’s trial but was not called.
But Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s lawyers also blamed the state for not doing more to collect this evidence earlier. “The state had been aware and had access to Teske for years,” her lawyers wrote.
At Friday’s hearing, Kari T. Morrissey, the lead special prosecutor who oversaw both Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s and Mr. Baldwin’s prosecutions, took the extraordinary step of calling herself as a witness to defend her handling of the new evidence. She said that after Mr. Teske spoke about the rounds during an interview ahead of the armorer’s trial, she asked for a photo of them so she could determine whether to ask law enforcement to collect them from Mr. Teske.
“When I saw this photograph,” Ms. Morrissey testified, “I could see that it was not at all similar to the live rounds on the set of ‘Rust,’ and I decided not to take any steps to collect this ammunition because it was in Arizona, had never come to New Mexico and didn’t match the live rounds on the set of ‘Rust.’”
But on Friday, when Judge Marlowe Sommer decided to examine the rounds herself in the courtroom, Ms. Morrissey said that three of them did, in fact, look similar to the live rounds collected on the “Rust” set after the fatal shooting.
Ms. Morrissey testified that she thought the new evidence furthered her argument that Ms. Gutierrez-Reed was the source of the live rounds on the film set. But in their court filing, the armorer’s lawyers argued that the state’s failure to collect the evidence early on and submit it for F.B.I. testing deprived them of the ability to determine whether it could have helped their client.
The armorer’s lawyers also raised other evidentiary disclosure concerns in their filing, pointing to a report from the prosecution’s forensic gun expert that had not been disclosed to them before trial and an interview with Seth Kenney, the main supplier of guns and ammunition on “Rust,” that was not disclosed to them until after the trial.
“The repeated discovery failures are certainly beneath what Ms. Gutierrez-Reed deserved,” her lawyers wrote. “And for her, the impact has been devastating. She now sits in state prison serving an 18-month sentence based on what we now know was a proceeding that was rendered unfair and unconstitutional by the state’s conduct.”
The armorer’s lawyers, Jason Bowles and Monnica L. Barreras, asked the judge to call for a new trial, dismiss the case or release Ms. Gutierrez-Reed from prison pending her appeal.
Ms. Morrissey declined to comment on the motion, saying that she planned to respond in a court filing next week.
Read More: ‘Rust’ Armorer Asks for New Trial After Dismissal of Alec Baldwin’s Case
