How Alec Baldwin’s Defense Set the ‘Rust’ Actor Free: ‘It Was Incredible Lawyering’
SANTA FE, N.M. — Alec Baldwin’s lawyers have been complaining for months that prosecutors were not sharing all the evidence against him in his manslaughter case.
They complained about missing forensics reports. They complained about redacted emails. They complained about videos buried on servers. It got them nowhere.
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So when they learned, at some point before Thursday afternoon, that a retired police officer had walked into the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office and dropped off a batch of bullets connected to the case — and once again, nobody told the defense — they did something weird.
They did not complain. Instead, they waited until the state got to its fourth witness on Thursday, crime scene technician Marissa Poppell.
And then they sprung a trap.
The case against Baldwin — which has been hanging over his head for nearly three years — collapsed in a few hours on Friday. The actor had been facing up to 18 months in prison for accidentally shooting Halyna Hutchins on the set of “Rust” in 2021. Instead, he walked out of the Judge Steve Herrera Judicial Complex and into a waiting Chevy Suburban as a free man.
“I think it was incredible lawyering to discover this evidence, to show the court through cross-examination what happened to it… and to get a dismissal with prejudice in 24 hours,” said Nick Hart, a defense lawyer in Albuquerque. “I’ve never seen that happen.”
Alex Spiro, Baldwin’s lead lawyer, set the wheels in motion on Thursday afternoon. At the end of several hours of cross-examination, he asked Poppell about a “Good Samaritan” who had dropped off bullets at the Sheriff’s Office. Poppell acknowledged that this had happened.
Spiro asked why nobody had told the defense, and Poppell said it was not her responsibility to do so.
“You buried it,” he said.
This nugget of information had been circulating weeks earlier in the small community of people who obsess about the “Rust” case. Variety heard about it from a film armorer, who heard about it from Jason Bowles, the attorney for “Rust” armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed.
At 7:52 p.m. Thursday night, the defense filed a motion to dismiss the case. It was either the fifth or sixth such motion since Baldwin was indicted in January, depending on how one counts it. Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer had rejected all the others.
But unlike the previous motions, this one was filed in the middle of trial. Had the trial not begun, Marlowe Sommer could have ordered a delay, to give the defense time to analyze the bullets. But once the trial started, that would not work. The jury had been seated, the defense had made its opening statement and laid out its trial strategy. In legalese, “jeopardy” had attached.
“That’s a question, y’know, ‘When do we want to raise this?'” said Steve Aarons, a defense lawyer in Santa Fe. “You may think, ‘Let’s get the jury empaneled.’ A month ago, the remedy would have been, ‘Do you need more time?’… If you wait for the jury to be empaneled, it brings a different specter into it.”
Kari Morrissey, the lead prosecutor, initially downplayed the revelation, saying on Thursday that law enforcement could easily show that the bullets in question did not match the ones found at the “Rust” scene, and were therefore irrelevant.
But by the time she showed up for a hearing on the defense motion on Friday morning, she knew it would be a long day. “We’re gonna need a glass of scotch tonight,” she told a member of her team who was sitting in the front row of the gallery.
Over the next few hours, an extraordinary scene unfolded, as the judge demanded to see the bullets, donned blue gloves, and cut open an evidence package. She displayed the bullets on a table, finding three Starline Brass rounds with silver primers — an apparent match for the fatal round.
In a scene that seemed ripped out of “A Few Good Men” or some other courtroom drama, Morrissey sought to explain — and called herself to the stand. By that point, the judge had seen enough.
“There is no one here that is requiring you to be called as a witness,” Marlowe Sommer said.
“The information needs to come out,” Morrissey said.
Morrissey took a seat at the witness stand, the judge swore her in, and Morrissey then laid out her account of the bullets. She said she didn’t believe they were relevant to the case, and did not know that they hadn’t been turned over to the defense.
Spiro then cross-examined her, asking about a series of people who had dropped out of the prosecution team over the last year — an investigator, a paralegal, an attorney. The last one was Erlinda Johnson, Morrissey’s co-counsel, who had been on the case until some point on Friday. Gasps filled the courtroom.
“Ms. Johnson didn’t agree with the decision to have a public hearing,” Morrissey said.
Spiro asked if she was pursuing the case out of animus for Baldwin. Morrissey denied that, saying she likes his movies and his politics. Spiro asked if she remembered ever calling Baldwin a “cocksucker” or “an arrogant prick.”
“I don’t recall saying that,” she said.
Marlowe Sommer then delivered her ruling, finding that the state’s conduct had compromised the integrity of the judicial system. She noted that since the trial had begun, remedies short of dismissal would not do the trick.
“If this conduct does not rise to the level of bad faith, it certainly comes so near to bad faith as to show signs of scorching,” the judge said, radiating anger. “Jeopardy has attached… There is no way for the court to right this wrong. The sanction of dismissal is the only warranted remedy.”
Baldwin’s wife and sister were in tears. Baldwin, also in tears, hugged Spiro, and then embraced his wife.
Morrissey was in some ways paying the price for errors that long predated her appointment to the case in March of 2023. From the moment Hutchins was shot, the key question in the case was “How did live rounds get on set?”
The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office never answered that question. At the Gutierrez Reed trial in February, Cpl. Alexandria Hancock said she never talked to Joe Swanson, the man who manufactured the bullets. She also never spoke one-on-one with Troy Teske, the man who stored them for years, waiting for law enforcement to come get them, before finally dropping off the bullets to the Sheriff’s Office at the conclusion of the Gutierrez Reed trial in March.
At the Gutierrez Reed trial, Hancock testified that the source of the live rounds was a side issue.
“Really what’s important to law enforcement were the circumstances of what occurred that day, and the facts and the evidence of what occurred during the incident,” she said.
When Morrissey took over the case, she made a “herculean” effort to find the source of the rounds. After a series of prosecutorial blunders that preceded her tenure, she was able to put things on track enough to convict Gutierrez Reed, who is now serving an 18-month sentence in state prison.
But the failure to disclose Teske’s bullets was the final blunder.
It’s still unclear whether the bullets would have made any difference in establishing Baldwin’s guilt, had they been disclosed. He was on trial for pointing a gun at Hutchins and, allegedly, pulling the trigger. Whoever supplied the live rounds to set, it wasn’t him.
But it was too much.
“I’m just flabbergasted,” Aarons said. “Even if you’ve got a good explanation for why it doesn’t matter, you’d make sure where the heck it was, and disclose it… The whole thing is crazy.”
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