Prosecutors in New Mexico defended their handling of the involuntary manslaughter case against Alec Baldwin on Friday, filing court papers in which they accused the actor of negligently failing to make sure the gun he was handed before the fatal “Rust” shooting was not loaded with live ammunition.
Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers had filed a motion last month seeking to get the charge dismissed, calling the prosecution of the actor an “abuse of the system” and accusing prosecutors of having failed to give the grand jury evidence that could have helped his case.
Mr. Baldwin was practicing drawing a gun he had been told was safe when it fired a live bullet in October 2021, killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins. The armorer responsible for weapons on the set, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter last month for loading a live round into the gun on a set where there was not supposed to be any live ammunition. She faces up to 18 months in prison.
In the court filing on Friday, prosecutors laid out some of their arguments for going ahead with the criminal case against Mr. Baldwin. They accused him of behaving on the film set with “absolutely no concern for how his conduct affects those around him,” and they defended their presentation to the grand jury, writing that they had read aloud the full letter that Mr. Baldwin’s lawyer had presented to them.
“It is the job of the special prosecutors to investigate the case and fairly and impartially prosecute the case, and we will continue to do so despite the defendant’s relentless attempts to discredit and intimidate the prosecution,” the prosecutors, Kari T. Morrissey and Jason J. Lewis, wrote.
A lawyer for Mr. Baldwin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Baldwin, 66, who has pleaded not guilty, has denied responsibility for Ms. Hutchins’s death from the beginning. He has asserted that he did not pull the trigger, that he had been told the gun did not contain live ammunition and that Ms. Hutchins had been directing him where to point the weapon when it went off.
His trial is scheduled for July.
The new filing sought to paint Mr. Baldwin in an unfavorable light, accusing him of “shamelessly” lying about the shooting. It describes a call he placed on the day of the shooting in an interview room at the sheriff’s department that was videotaped by investigators. In it, he urges his family not to cancel their planned trip to New Mexico despite the tragedy. “I won’t work and we’ll go and enjoy ourselves,” it quotes him as saying.
The court filing also provided an account of the events leading up to the prosecution’s decision to revive the criminal case against Mr. Baldwin, several months after it withdrew the initial involuntary manslaughter charge against him.
The prosecutors wrote that in October, they gave Mr. Baldwin the option of what they called a “very favorable plea agreement.” The filing did not detail the substance of the agreement but called it a “similar offer” to the one prosecutors presented to Dave Halls, the movie’s first assistant director.
Mr. Halls avoided prison time by pleading no contest to a misdemeanor count of negligent use of a deadly weapon, admitting to not properly checking the gun that day.
The prosecutors rescinded the offer to Mr. Baldwin, they wrote, after learning of the defense’s intentions to file a civil complaint against the state over the prosecution of the case, in what they considered an attempt to “direct media attention” away from the potential plea. They also said the decision came after they learned that Mr. Baldwin was urging witnesses in the case to sit for interviews for a documentary he was working on about Ms. Hutchins.
In legal papers filed last month, a lawyer for Mr. Baldwin, Luke Nikas, wrote that the prosecutors decided to proceed with the case despite evidence presented to them that the gun on set had been modified in a way that could have made it easier to suddenly discharge — an argument that prosecutors have rejected.
“The defendant simply doesn’t have a leg to stand on concerning his claim that the hammer of the gun was modified,” the new filing states.
Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers have said that the actor properly followed safety bulletins issued by SAG-AFTRA, the union representing actors. The union has taken issue with assertions by New Mexico prosecutors that actors are responsible for checking guns that they are handed on set, saying that “an actor’s job is not to be a firearms or weapons expert.”
The prosecutors in New Mexico have countered that the union rules are not a valid defense.
“Mr. Baldwin’s failure to exercise his option to simply observe the armorer load the dummy rounds into the gun and visually and/or audibly demonstrate to the actor that the rounds are safe, inert dummy rounds was not a violation of the SAG safety bulletins,” the prosecutors wrote in Friday’s filing, “but it was a violation of New Mexico law.”
