Kari Morrissey, the lead special prosecutor in the recently dismissed involuntary manslaughter case against Alec Baldwin, wants a second chance. The lawyer filed a petition on Wednesday to Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer to reconsider her decision to abandon the case, alleging that defense attorneys had pulled one over on her, according to Variety.
“This is a smoke screen created by the defense and was intended to sway and confuse the court … and it was successful,” Morrissey wrote, according to The Associated Press.
In July, Sommer ended the trial, in which Baldwin had been charged with a felony for allegedly firing the shot that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the movie Rust when Baldwin’s defense said that Morrissey’s team had withheld evidence from them during discovery. The evidence in question were bullets that the Sheriff’s Department had come into possession of months earlier.
Morrissey believed the bullets were of no relevance to Baldwin’s defense and that she didn’t need to share them with his attorney. The judge disagreed. “There is no way for the court to right this wrong,” Sommer told the Santa Fe courtroom. “[The defense’s] motion to dismiss with prejudice is granted.”
Morrissey is now arguing that the government has a right to appeal Sommer’s decision. Variety reports that she’s asking the judge to probe into how the defense team learned of the withheld evidence. She believes the defense team, which numbered nine to her two, were aware of the bullets long before they filed for dismissal and that attorneys for Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the production’s armorer who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in April and is serving an 18-month sentence, had enlightened them to the bullets. (On Wednesday, Gutierrez-Reed pleaded guilty to bringing a loaded gun to a bar before the Rust incident in exchange for probation.)
A complication for the prosecutor, however, is the fact that Judge Sommer dismissed the case “with prejudice.” This means it cannot be refiled.
“The fact that the motion was raised during trial was a tactical decision by the defense to take advantage of the State’s limited resources,” Morrissey argued. She alleged that Baldwin’s attorneys “laid in wait to move to dismiss during trial when it had a tactical advantage.”
Morrissey would like a higher court to review the proceedings. Morrissey’s team had argued that Baldwin was pointing a gun, loaded with live bullets, at Hutchins when it went off, killing her and injuring director Joel Souza. Baldwin argued that he pulled the hammer but not the trigger, according to The AP. He claimed he was unaware live bullets were on set.
