Trigger Warning: This article contains mention of death by shooting.
Alec Baldwin’s legal team has requested a Santa Fe court to dismiss prosecutor Kari T. Morrissey’s appeal to revive the actor’s involuntary manslaughter case, which was dismissed with prejudice by Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer in July. A case dismissed with prejudice means the court has permanently closed the case. However, in her September 5 filing, Morrissey requested the judge to reconsider her ruling from earlier this year.
In a response filed by Baldwin’s lawyers on Friday, September 20, the actor’s defense asked the court to turn a deaf ear to Morrissey’s request, billing it as a “continued abuse of the judicial process.”
“She repeatedly violated the State’s disclosure obligations, buried evidence, lied about it at trial, and then lied about her reasons for lying about it,” Baldwin’s legal team remarked, notifying the court that the State has failed to present any concrete information to warrant reconsideration.
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For those who may not know, Baldwin was tried on involuntary manslaughter charges in July after he, while holding a prop gun on the filming set of Rust, a 2021 western flick, accidentally discharged a live bullet that claimed cinematographer Halayna Hutchins’s life and injured director Joel Souza.
Following the accident, Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was found guilty of negligence in ensuring that the weapon she handed over to the actor contained dummies and not real bullets. She is currently serving 18 months in prison. Baldwin was charged with the same count as her and could’ve faced similar time behind bars if Judge Mary Marlowe had not dismissed his case on the third day of trial after discovering that Morrissey, the lead prosecutor in the case, had voluntarily hidden crucial evidence from the defense team.
During Baldwin’s trial in July, his lawyer Luke Nikas managed to prove in court that a man named Troy Teske—a friend of Thell Reed, the father of the convicted Rust armorer—had turned over ammunition to authorities that he thought was connected to the case. This is the piece of evidence Morrissey withheld, which she explained in court under oath she did because she didn’t think the ammunition handed over was considered Rust evidence. Sommer ultimately sided with the defense.
Morrissey initially filed the motion to revive the case against Baldwin on August 30, but the court denied it on September 5 as it exceeded the permitted page limit. Morrissey modified her 52-page filing by bringing it down to 10 pages the same day.
The defense team argued in their Friday motion that the court should deny the state’s amended motion, as case law supports the July dismissal granted by Sommer.
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