Alec Baldwin ‘Rust’ Manslaughter Case Dismissed, Actor Breaks Down in Tears

In a stunning turn of events at Alec Baldwin’s involuntary manslaughter trial, a New Mexico judge dismissed the single felony count filed against the actor on Friday and said prosecutors could not bring it again. The shocking decision followed after Baldwin’s defense lawyers filed an emergency motion alleging prosecutors and investigators withheld evidence.

“There is no way for the court to right this wrong,” New Mexico Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer ruled as Baldwin broke down in tears in the Santa Fe courtroom. “Your motion to dismiss with prejudice is granted.”

Baldwin, 66, hugged his lawyers Alex Spiro and Luke Nikas and then turned around to hug his weeping wife Hilaria. The scene capped a long legal nightmare for the actor in which he had been fighting allegations he recklessly pointed a replica revolver at cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and pulled the trigger on the set of the western movie Rust on October 21, 2021. He has long maintained he did not pull the trigger.

Jurors were sent home from the trial early Friday as the court held an evidentiary hearing over how a batch of .45 caliber ammunition possibly linked to armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed had been booked by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office last March but not supplied to Baldwin’s defense either physically or through the supplemental evidence report that it generated.

In her ruling, Judge Marlowe Sommer said the live ammunition, surrendered by a friend of  Gutierrez-Reed’s father Thell Reed, could have helped Baldwin undermine prosecutors’ theory of the case and shore up his defense claim that the actions of others, not his own, led to the fatal shooting of Hutchins.

In delivering her admittedly “extreme” decision, Judge Marlowe Sommer said prosecutors “unilaterally withheld” evidence that was both “favorable” and “material” to Baldwin’s defense, the two thresholds necessary for her ruling. “The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office and the prosecution failed to disclose the supplemental [evidence] report to defense and provide defense an opportunity to inspect the rounds collected into evidence,” she said. “The suppressed evidence is favorable to the accused. It is impeachment evidence (and) is potentially exculpatory to the defense.” She said her ruling did not require a finding of “bad faith” on the part of the law enforcement officials who collected the evidence from a man named Troy Teske on March 6, 2024, the same day Gutierrez-Reed was convicted at her separate involuntary manslaughter trial.

“This evidence is material. 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. The defense is not in a position to test the state’s theory as to the source of the live rounds that killed Ms. Hutchins,” Judge Marlowe Sommer said.

The lead special prosecutor on the case, Kari Morrissey, fought the motion from prosecutors to the point that she called herself as a witness during the evidentiary hearing Friday. She admitted under oath that her co-prosecutor, Erlinda Johnson, had resigned from the trial earlier in the day amid a disagreement over how to handle the public hearing. Morrissey said she never considered the ammunition material to Baldwin’s case because it was never on the Rust movie set and had never even entered the state of New Mexico to her knowledge. She said Teske claimed he received the live ammunition from Thell Reed and believed it might match the live ammunition eventually found on the Rust set.

Morrissey testified that even before Teske surrendered the bullets last March, she knew about the ammunition and asked him to send a photo. “When I saw this photograph, I could see that it was not at all similar to the live rounds on the set of Rust, and I decided not to take any steps to collect this ammunition.” She said Friday that all six live rounds eventually found on the Rust set were identical, and that they differed from the rounds in the image sent by Teske in terms of color and cone shape.

Under cross-examination by Spiro, Morrissey was asked if she had made disparaging comments about Baldwin to witnesses in the case. She denied it. “I actually really appreciate Mr. Baldwin’s movie. I really appreciated the acting that he did on Saturday Night Live. And I really appreciate his politics,” she testified, referring to Baldwin’s well-known opposition to former president Donald Trump.

In a bombshell moment earlier in the day on Friday, an evidence technician for the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office pulled out the batch of bullets for the judge to inspect each cartridge. In the evidence envelope filled with loose bullets, there were three cartridges that appeared to be a visual match to the live bullets found on Rust. Morrissey told the court she was seeing that ammunition for the first time.

Not even the defense knew that was about to happen. In the dismissal motion filed by Baldwin’s team Thursday night, his lawyers focused largely on what they described as a pattern of misconduct on the part of law enforcement. “The state not only failed to disclose the evidence — it affirmatively hid it under a file number that is unaffiliated with the Rust case, and then failed to disclose the only documentation that it claims to have created that would have alerted Baldwin to the existence of the evidence,” defense lawyer Luke Nikas wrote.

Friday’s fireworks happened on the third day of the long-awaited criminal trial. Jurors already had heard testimony from seven witnesses. The judge said she would deal with excusing the jury as Baldwin made his way out of the courthouse.

In a statement to Rolling Stone, Jason Bowles, the defense lawyer for Gutierrez-Reed, who is now in custody serving an 18-month sentence while she appeals her verdict, said that they would be “filing a motion to dismiss on similar grounds for discovery violations.” He added, “The judge absolutely did the right thing and upheld the integrity of the judicial system.”

One legal expert who followed the hearing on Friday said she expects Gutierrez-Reed’s legal team will also file a motion for her release from prison while she continues to fight her conviction. “A lot of the same aspects of the judge’s decision today apply to her case as well,” Jennifer Burrill, president of the New Mexico Criminal Defense Lawyers Association tells Rolling Stone.

“In terms of what happened today. the prosecutor putting herself on the stand as a witness is unprecedented,” Burrill says, adding that the resignation of Johnson suggested “egregious” problems with the prosecution. “Erlinda is really well-respected in the community, so to hear that she quit right before they went into that motion hearing was a red flag for sure.”

Speaking to reporters outside the courtroom Friday, Morrissey said she respected the judge’s decision but still did not believe the ammunition collected from Teske was material to Baldwin’s trial. “I’m disappointed, because I believe that the importance of the evidence was misconstrued by the defense attorneys,” she said, according to Variety. “We did everything humanly possible to bring justice to Halyna and to her family, and we’re proud of the work that we did.”