Hannah Gutierrez Reed appears in a screengrab from a videotaped police interview.
The final defendant left standing in the case over the fatal on-set shooting, “Rust” armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed faces blistering new allegations about her behavior before the tragic death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
“Witnesses in the current case will testify that Defendant Gutierrez was drinking heavily and smoking marijuana in the evenings during the shooting of Rust,” special prosecutor Kari Morrissey wrote in a 23-page legal brief. “It is likely that Defendant Gutierrez was hung over when she inserted a live bullet into a gun that she knew was going to be used at some point by an actor while filming a shooting scene with other actors and crew members.”
After New Mexico prosecutors dropped charges against actor and producer Alec Baldwin in April, Gutierrez became the sole person remaining on the criminal docket. The third co-defendant, assistant director David Halls, pleaded no contest to a lesser charge of unsafe handling of a deadly weapon, eventually ducking jail time through a suspended 6-month sentence served through “unsupervised probation.”
When the case against Baldwin fell apart, Gutierrez’s attorney Jason Bowles predicted swift victory for his client as well. The initial prosecutorial team, led by First Judicial District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies and special prosecutor Andrea Reeb, was in shambles. Reeb resigned after Baldwin’s legal team blasted her appointment as unconstitutional, noting that she’s also a Republican state lawmaker. Carmack-Altwies followed suit, after multiple prosecutorial setbacks.
After they were replaced by special prosecutors Morrissey and Jason Lewis, Gutierrez’s attorneys praised their “very diligent and thorough approach to the entire investigation.”
“They are seeking the truth and we are also,” those attorneys, Bowles and Todd Bullion, said in April. “The truth about what happened will come out and the questions that we have long sought answers for will be answered. We fully expect at the end of this process that Hannah will also be exonerated.”
The honeymoon phase between the new special prosecutors and defense counsel appears to be over.
“The prosecution has so mishandled this case and the case is so weak that they are now resorting to character assassination tactics to further taint the jury pool,” Bowles told Law&Crime in a blistering statement. “This investigation and prosecution has not been about seeking Justice; for them it’s been about finding a convenient scapegoat.”
The special prosecutors, for their part, defended the integrity of their decisions.
“Ms. Gutierrez is not being selectively prosecuted,” they wrote in a legal brief opposing her motion to dismiss. “She is being appropriately prosecuted because her primary function as an armorer on the Rust movie set was to ensure gun safety. Her reckless failure resulted in the senseless death of another human being. All Defendant Gutierrez needed to do was shake every bullet and make sure it rattled before putting it in the gun – she failed and killed someone.”
A spokesperson for the prosecution didn’t immediately respond to an email requesting comment.
Read the special prosecutors’ filing here.
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