The movie armorer who loaded the live round into Alec Baldwin’s gun before it fired the fatal shot that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins wants a new trial based on “revelations” that prosecutors failed to hand over “bombshell exculpatory evidence” before she faced the jury that convicted her last March.
In a new motion demanding immediate jail release filed Thursday in New Mexico, Gutierrez-Reed’s defense lawyer Jason Bowles wrote that his client deserves a new trial due to the “dishonesty and misconduct” of prosecutors. He claimed they “buried” the critical evidence when they failed to hand over a written report from a gun expert who analyzed the replica revolver at the center of the deadly October 21, 2021 shooting on the set of the western movie Rust.
The existence of the report and the fact that it wasn’t shared with Gutierrez-Reed’s defense team was the subject of extensive testimony by the gun expert at an evidentiary hearing in Baldwin’s separate involuntary manslaughter prosecution on Monday. The expert, Lucien Haag, testified that he wrote the report in question last August as a supplement to two initial reports. Hired by prosecutors to reconstruct and analyze the gun after prior testing by the FBI damaged the weapon in 2022, Haag said his third report focused on the strange diagonal markings on some internal components of the gun. In the third report, he wrote that the unexplained markings did “not appear to be original manufacturing marks” or the result of the damage incurred by the FBI.
“The state withheld bombshell exculpatory evidence that it had a constitutional obligation to disclose and that would have resulted in a fundamentally different trial and likely a different outcome,” Bowles wrote in the new motion obtained by Rolling Stone. “The state’s belated revelation is a textbook example of new evidence warranting a retrial.” (The lead prosecutor on the case, Kari T. Morrissey, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Baldwin’s defense lawyers made a big deal of the third report at their Monday hearing asking for dismissal of Baldwin’s manslaughter case. They claim the report backs up their theory that the gun was altered or damaged in some way before it discharged in Baldwin’s hands without the actor pulling the trigger. Morrissey told the court Monday that it was true she never shared the report with anyone, but she called it a simple “error” she was willing to admit. She alleges FBI tests conducted before the gun was damaged prove that Baldwin must have pulled the trigger.
For his part, Haag testified Monday that he changed his opinion after writing the August report, so it’s no longer relevant. He said he now believes the diagonal marks were the result of an FBI technician striking the gun with a rawhide mallet to see if it would fire without a trigger pull. Haag said that at the time he wrote the report, he thought the mallet testing was conducted with a precision apparatus. He later learned, before Gutierrez-Reed’s trial, the the mallet testing was conducted “freehand,” so the angled markings made sense, he claimed.
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in New Mexico in the same Santa Fe courtroom where Baldwin is due to face a jury on his own involuntary manslaughter charge next month. She is serving an 18-month sentence while she appeals the conviction.
At the trial for Gutierrez-Reed, Haag didn’t mention his third report and testified that he saw no evidence of modification or damage to the gun from anything other than the FBI testing. At Baldwin’s evidentiary hearing this week, he defended that testimony. “By the time of [Gutierrez-Reed’s] trial, [I had] learned that he used no apparatus to conduct his impact test. He did it by freehand, and right away, as soon as I knew that, there’s the opportunity for an angular component to his rapping of the hammer. That would explain it,” he claimed under aggressive questioning by Baldwin’s high-powered lawyer Alex Spiro.
Spiro grilled Haag over the fact that the first time he ever met the FBI technician who conducted the test was last week, on June 17. Haag said that was true, but he again claimed he learned critical details about the technician’s testing methods through prosecutors before Gutierrez-Reed’s trial.
“I did not have a face-to-face by Zoom with [the FBI technician] until the 17th, but I was now aware by the time of [Gutierrez-Reed’s] trial of his methodology. It was not clear in his notes. The prosecutor interviewed him or asked some questions and relayed that information to me. That left those diagonal marks fully explainable, only explainable, by the impact testing,” Haag testified Monday.
New Mexico prosecutors told jurors during Gutierrez-Reed’s trial that she unwittingly brought live ammunition onto the Rust set and failed to follow basic gun safety rules. She was convicted of involuntary manslaughter but acquitted of an evidence-tampering charge. The judge who oversaw her case is expected to issue a ruling on Friday related to Balwin’s motion that the FBI testing that damaged the gun deprived him of due process because he’ll never be able to test the gun himself to prove his claim it accidentally fired without a trigger pull.
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