(RightWing.org) – Days after the manslaughter case against actor Alec Baldwin was thrown out by a New Mexico court, the movie armorer who loaded the gun for him has called for her conviction to be dismissed. Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was hired as a part-time armorer on the set of “Rust,” was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in March and sentenced to 18 months in prison. She’s arguing that the same evidence that cleared Baldwin should also exonerate her.
On October 21, 2021, Alec Baldwin fired a revolver into cinematographer Halyna Hutchins’s chest, killing her. The gun had been handed to him by first assistant director David Halls, who had declared it “cold” — unloaded — without checking it first. It had been loaded by props assistant Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who until four days before the shooting had also been contracted as the movie’s part-time armorer.
Halls was fined and sentenced to six months of unsupervised probation; Gutierrez-Reed, who missed the fact that one of the rounds she loaded into the .45 revolver was live, is in jail.
On July 12, Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer dismissed the case against Baldwin, the final defendant. Her reason for axing the trial was that, in March, Troy Teske handed in a box of ammunition to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office and claimed it had come from the set and matched the bullet that had killed Hutchins.
Special prosecutor Kari Morrissey decided not to use the ammunition in evidence, at least partly because Teske just happens to be a friend of Gutierrez-Reed’s stepfather. However, Sommer ruled that the state had concealed evidence and threw out the whole case.
Now Gutierrez-Reed’s defense team is arguing that if the evidence could potentially have cleared Baldwin, it could potentially have cleared the hapless former armorer too. Attorney Jason Bowles asked “How can it be any different with Ms Gutierrez-Reed’s case” when the court had already ruled that the “integrity of the judicial system” demanded Baldwin was cleared.
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