‘Rust’ Gunsmith Denies New Trial After Alec Baldwin Case Dismissed

Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the rust Filmmaker, now serving an 18-month prison sentence for the shooting death of camerawoman Halyna Hutchins, has lost her bid for a new trial and release from prison.

In related rulings issued Monday, Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer of Santa Fe said Gutierrez-Reed failed to convince the court that her involuntary manslaughter conviction last March could have been avoided if she had been convicted by certain would have known evidence that only came to light in the subsequent, related trial of Alec Baldwin on the same charge. In the Baldwin case, his trial ended in July with the dramatic dismissal of his only charge of involuntary manslaughter after Marlowe Sommer ruled that prosecutors had information about a shipment of ammunition that was stolen on the day Gutierrez-Reed was born by a so-called who had been handed over to a good Samaritan, was found guilty of being “unilaterally withheld”.

The batch of ammunition proved so important to Baldwin’s prosecution because the person who handed it over, Troy Teske, said it belonged to Gutierrez-Reed’s father, famed movie gunsmith Thell Reed. The batch notably included Starline Brass cartridges with nickel primers that matched the live bullet that killed Hutchins. Baldwin’s lawyers argued that the suppressed evidence was key to their defense theory that Gutierrez-Reed’s father gave Starline Brass cartridges with nickel primers to props supplier Seth Kenney – and that Kenney, a reputable gunsmith, allegedly put some of the live cartridges in the boxes of inert dummy cartridges that he sold to the rust production in a turn of events that Baldwin could never have predicted. (Kenney vehemently denies this claim and was never charged in the case.)

With her decisions Monday, Marlowe Sommer said Gutierrez-Reed was not in a similar position to Baldwin when it came to the Teske ammunition. She said Gutierrez-Reed’s lawyers knew Teske was about to go to trial and chose not to collect the ammunition or call him to the witness stand. The judge said that only after Gutierrez-Reed was sentenced did Teske turn the bullets over to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office, where they were registered under a different case number and were not released to Baldwin’s defense. The judge also concluded that the delayed release of an interview with Kenney and a suppressed supplementary report about the replica revolver that killed Hutchins did not provide sufficient grounds to grant Gutierrez-Reed a new trial.

“The defendant has not demonstrated that this evidence undermines confidence in the verdict, given the importance of this evidence in relation to the entire record,” Marlowe Sommer wrote in her ruling on Monday.

In their verdict last March, the jury that convicted Gutierrez-Reed found that she negligently loaded the live bullet into the old-fashioned Pietta revolver that Baldwin fired during a rehearsal at a wooden church on Oct. 21, 2021. Baldwin, 66, has long maintained he didn’t pull the trigger.