A New Mexico judge on Friday threw out the involuntary manslaughter case against Alec Baldwin in the middle of his trial and said it cannot be filed again. Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer dismissed the case with prejudice based on the misconduct of police and prosecutors over the withholding of evidence from the defense, the AP reports. The involuntary manslaughter trial involved the 2021 shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the film Rust. Baldwin, 66, cried and embraced his attorneys and then his wife, Hilaria, after the decision was announced. He left the courthouse without speaking to reporters. The actor faced 18 months in prison if convicted.
"The late discovery of this evidence during trial has impeded the effective use of evidence in such a way that it has impacted the fundamental fairness of the proceedings," Marlowe Sommer said. "If this conduct does not rise to the level of bad faith it certainly comes so near to bad faith to show signs of scorching." The judge had paused the trial earlier Friday and sent the jury home so she could consider the defense motion to dismiss and consider further testimony outside the presence of jurors. The defense argued that prosecutors hid evidence from them about ammunition that may be related to the shooting. "They buried it," said Luke Nikas, a lawyer for Baldwin, per the New York Times. The prosecution has said that the ammunition was not connected to the case and was not hidden.
The issue came up Thursday, the second day of the trial in Santa Fe, during defense questioning of sheriff's crime scene technician Marissa Poppell. Baldwin lawyer Alex Spiro suggested with his questions that Poppell and other authorities had been too cozy with the film's firearms supplier Seth Kenney and had insufficiently investigated whether he was responsible for the live bullets reaching the set. Special prosecutor Kari Morrissey established in her questioning that the source of the ammunition was Troy Teske, a friend of the father of the film's armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who has already been convicted of involuntary manslaughter for her role in Hutchins' death. She was sentenced to 18 months in prison and is appealing her conviction.
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