Almost three years after the fatal shooting on the movie set of Rust, prosecutors began to lay out their case against Alec Baldwin in a packed Santa Fe courtroom, painting a picture of an unsafe workplace on a tight budget with a lead actor who violated the “cardinal rules of firearm safety”.
Proceedings in the actor’s involuntary manslaughter trial kicked off on Wednesday with the prosecution and defence offering their opening statements. The courtroom was filled to capacity with dozens of media as well as Mr Baldwin’s wife and brother, who sat just behind the actor.
The state said Mr Baldwin acted in a reckless manner that led to the death of the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who was killed on the film’s set at the Bonanza Creek Ranch, a popular filming location 30 minutes outside the city, in October 2021.
The actor and co-producer on the western was rehearsing when he pointed a prop firearm at Ms Hutchins and the weapon fired a single bullet, killing Ms Hutchins and injuring the director, Joel Souza.
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The evidence will show the gun was functional, prosecutor Erlinda Johnson said, despite Mr Baldwin’s statements that it had malfunctioned. But Mr Baldwin failed to do a safety check and repeatedly violated set safety rules with the weapon by leaving his finger on the hammer and trigger, and pointing it at people on set while filming, she argued.
“That gun the defendant had asked to be assigned worked perfectly fine, as it was designed,” Ms Johnson said. “He pointed the gun at another human being, cocked the gun and pulled that trigger in reckless disregard for Ms Hutchins’s safety.”
The trial will focus extensively on the Colt .45 used in the shooting. Mr Baldwin has long claimed that he did not fire the weapon. The prosecution contends that forensic testing on the gun shows the actor had pulled the trigger and that Mr Baldwin was negligent in his handling of it.
The defence argued in opening statements that Mr Baldwin was focused on playing a character and was not responsible for checking the gun. Others on set were tasked with ensuring the weapon’s safety, defence attorney Alex Spiro said, namely the film’s armourer and first assistant director.
The most critical issue in the case is how a real bullet got on the film set, he said.
“The evidence will show that on a movie set, safety has to occur before the gun is placed in an actor’s hands,” Mr Spiro said.
“He was just acting as he has done for generations and it was the safety apparatus that failed them all.”
This criminal case against Mr Baldwin has been winding its way through the New Mexico legal system since January 2024, when a grand jury indicted him on a charge of involuntary manslaughter. Prosecutors had previously charged him with the same offense in 2023 but later dropped the charge and said they needed more time to review the evidence.
Mr Baldwin’s legal team had repeatedly attempted to get the charge against him dropped, and last month sought dismissal on grounds that prosecutors had allowed potentially “exculpatory evidence” to be destroyed in the FBI testing of the firearm before the defence could examine it. Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer denied those requests.
On Tuesday, proceedings moved forward as a jury of 11 women and five men were selected from a pool of 70 people. Only three of the potential jurors said they had not seen or heard anything about the case, but all of those selected said that they had not formed an opinion about the incident and that they felt they could be fair.
“Our job – the attorneys for both sides – is to make sure we get a fair and impartial jury,” prosecutor Kari Morrissey said on Tuesday. “We want to get jurors who can be fair to the state. We also want to get jurors who can be fair to Mr Baldwin.”
The trial comes after Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the chief weapons handler on the Rust set, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison. Legal experts have said that prosecutors may have a harder time proving Mr Baldwin’s guilt after Ms Gutierrez-Reed was deemed responsible in her trial.