The New Mexico criminal case against actor Alec Baldwin, stemming from a fatal shooting on the set of his 2021 film “Rust,” ended Monday, after prosecutor Kari Morrissey withdrew her appeal against dismissal of the case.
Baldwin’s attorneys, Luke Nikas and Alex Spiro, said in a statement that “today’s decision to dismiss the appeal is the final vindication of what Alec Baldwin and his attorneys have said from the beginning: It was an unspeakable tragedy, but Alec Baldwin committed no crime.”
A New Mexico judge had dismissed involuntary manslaughter charges against Baldwin in July, agreeing with the actor’s lawyers that Morrissey and the sheriff’s office withheld evidence about the origin of the real bullet that killed Halyna Hutchins, the director of “Rust” photography, in 2021.
The district attorney’s office said it remained in strong disagreement with the judge’s decision to dismiss the case against Baldwin.
However, the decision to drop an appeal of that decision was made after the attorney general’s office told Morrissey that it “had no intention of pursuing the appeal exhaustively on behalf of the prosecution,” according to the statement.
Hutchins was killed when Baldwin pointed a gun at him while setting up a scene on a movie set near Santa Fe. The gun fired a projectile inadvertently loaded by the film’s weapons chief, Hannah Gutiérrez. Gutierrez was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in March and sentenced a month later.
The “Rockefeller Plaza” actor denied pulling the trigger and said he had been ordered to aim it at the camera, but the FBI and an independent firearms expert determined the gun would not fire without the trigger pulled.
According to historian Alan Rode, Hutchins’ death was the first fatal film shooting in which a live bullet was mistaken for a blank since Hollywood’s silent era.
In the past, shootings on Hollywood sets have been resolved through civil lawsuits, such as the latest fatality in 1993, Brandon Lee, who died when a blank cartridge dislodged a bullet stuck in the barrel of a revolver during the filming of “The Raven.”
With information from Reuters.
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