Prosecutors have a clear, unambiguous duty to turn over any possibly exculpatory evidence to the defense, even if the possibility seems remote. To file those bullets under a separate case number looks a helluva lot like a deliberate attempt to hide their existence. Maybe it was the sheriff’s office that chose to do that, without telling the prosecution, but prosecutors are supposed to know all the details of the case.
ETA: Whoever made the hide-the-ball decision deserves to be in big, big trouble. No doubt the sheriff’s office and the prosecution are already in CYA mode.
So, I’m trying to be clear on what happened here, as this thread has pretty much been my only source of information about the trial(s).
I watched the video posted upthread. Just who was this “Good Samaritan” they were talking about? What exactly did he bring to the police and what significance did he claim it had? Can any random person walk into a police station and say, “here’s some evidence in that high-profile case you’re working on” and expect to be taken seriously? I agree that the prosecution seemed to have no idea about this.
I’m now picturing friends and family of anybody who gets arrested showing up at the police station to offer up “evidence” and then expecting the case to be dismissed if the cops don’t immediately offer it up to the defense, however worthless it may be.
I never thought Baldwin should have been charged in the first place, and I’m not mad the case was dismissed. But the whole situation just seems… weird.
The NYT article linked above should answer these questions. Here are some excerpts. Morrissey is the lead prosecutor.
The ammunition examined in court on Friday came from a man named Troy Teske, a friend of Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s stepfather…
He first surfaced in the trial on Thursday, as Mr. Baldwin’s defense team questioned a crime scene technician. It emerged that Mr. Teske, a retired police officer, had gone to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office around the time of Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s trial and handed over some ammunition that he believed was related to the case.
The crime scene technician… put it under a different case number than the “Rust” case.
Ms. Morrissey said in court that, after viewing a photo… she had determined that the ammunition was not relevant to the “Rust” investigation because it did not look similar to the live rounds that were collected on the movie set. “This has no evidentiary value whatsoever,” she said in court…
But when the ammunition was brought into court… it became clear that some resembled the ammunition collected on the set…
“The state’s willful withholding of this information was intentional and deliberate,” Judge Marlowe Sommer said.
ETA: This is a condensed set of short, relevant excerpts from the article, omitting most of the text.
Anyway, her co-counsel sure made an interesting call by resigning before the motion was even heard. What’d she think that was going to do for her career prospects (she is in private practice and a google search suggests she runs her own small firm or else is a solo practitioner).
My thought is how screwed an average Joe with a public defender would have been (and I’m sure are frequently), given in this case, where they knew every smallest detail would be scrutinized by the best lawyers in the country, the prosecutors:
Charged him with a crime that did not even apply in this case (like wasn’t even on the books when the incident happened IIRC)
Blatantly hid evidence that supported his case from the defence
What goes on when they know full well the overworked public defender is not going to have time to scrutinize every detail?
How exactly does it support his case? No one has been saying that Baldwin brought the ammunition onto the set. So what does it matter to the case against Baldwin if it was the ammunition supplier, the armorer, or members of the crew who brought the ammunition onto the set. Remember Baldwin as producer as responsible has been dropped by the judge.
I agree. I’d say the prosecution case is unrecoverably tainted, even if the bullets weren’t absolute proof of anything. They got busted hiding one piece of evidence, leaving an opening big enough to drive a covered wagon through to seriously question what else was hidden, and whether any other form of evidence tampering took place.
It could make a big difference depending on the details. How would you feel as a juror trying to decide if Baldwin had been negligent if you heard one of the following bits of testimony:
Live ammo getting on set was someone else’s mistake, so as far as Baldwin knew, he was following all the gun procedures he’d been trained to, and he had no reason to believe the gun was hot.
Many people, including Baldwin, knew that there was live ammo on set, a violation of the rules, but he decided to go through with the gun practice anyway.
It also might have been completely irrelevant, but the defense had the right to decide to present it or not, and let the jury determine the relevance; the prosecutors also could decide to present it or not, what they can’t do is withhold it.
You think SHE’S the one who comes off looking “interesting” here? I suspect she walked because Morrissey was doing something - as the judge put it - “so near to bad faith as to show signs of scorching prejudice.”
I haven’t followed this case closely at all, but what I’m wondering is, how did the person who decided to hide the information think this would help Baldwin?
TBH I’m not 100% sure either. @echoreply’s answer above is my best guess too. They were planning to claim he knew that people (including Baldwin himself) had been lax with live ammunition from the armorer and that was how the live ammo ended up in the gun, and because of that Baldwin couldn’t claim he knew absolutely that the gun was safe. But if the ammunition was from someone else other than armorer that gives him an out.
The evidence was an envelope of bullets brought in to the police by a former cop who was a friend of Hannah Gutierrez’s father. The information wasn’t so much hidden as never revealed to the defense, but the state is obligated to turn over such material. I think it’s likely the so-called evidence was brought to the police to help Hannah Gutierrez and may still do that. I also think it’s likely that those bullets have nothing to do with this case but served their purpose of adding doubt to the process.
