Picture: Luis Sánchez Saturno – Pool/Getty Images
Armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was sentenced to 18 months in prison on April 15 in the deadly Rust established taking pictures in New Mexico. Gutierrez-Reed was convicted of involuntary manslaughter on March 6 for the 2021 on-established incident that still left cinematographer Halyna Hutchins dead. Hutchins was killed soon after Alec Baldwin allegedly fired a prop gun loaded with dwell ammunition in her path. Director Joel Souza, who was also shot, survived. “You alone turned a harmless weapon into a deadly weapon,” claimed Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer, offering the optimum sentence. “But for you, Ms. Hutchins would be alive, a partner would have his spouse, and a very little boy would have his mom.” In the course of Gutierrez-Reed’s latest trial, prosecutors argued that she unsuccessful to thoroughly check ammunition in the gun — and that it was her fault that are living ammunition wound up on the established. Equally Gutierrez-Reed and Baldwin pleaded not responsible in their respective legal scenarios. Baldwin, who faces a trial in July, has argued that he did not pull the trigger.
Gutierrez-Reed created a tearful request for probation for the duration of the sentencing hearing. “I am saddened by the way the media sensationalized our traumatic tragedy and portrayed me as a full monster, which has truly been the total reverse of what is in my coronary heart,” she mentioned. She referred to as Hutchins an “inspiration” to her and stated she is “beyond grateful” that Souza survived. Choose Sommer later mentioned she “did not hear” Gutierrez-Reed “take accountability.”
In progress of Gutierrez-Reed’s sentencing, prosecutors requested that she provide an 18-thirty day period sentence. They painted her as unrepentant in courtroom filings, citing jailhouse cellular phone phone calls because her conviction. “She continued to complain in jail phone calls about the unfavorable outcomes this incident has had on her life and her modeling job when under no circumstances expressing legitimate remorse at any time,” they wrote, noting that she referred to jurors as “idiots.”
About the system of her two-7 days-lengthy demo, both equally the prosecution and defense largely rehashed their prolonged-held positions. Prosecutors instructed jurors that Gutierrez-Reed flouted popular-feeling gun-security protocols on the set the defense, in the meantime, insisted that she was a “scapegoat.” In his opening statement, prosecutor Jason Lewis informed jurors, “By failing to make these crucial safety checks, the defendant acted negligently and without the need of due caution … The choices she produced that day in the end contributed to Ms. Hutchins’s death.” Lewis ended his opening assertion by quoting Gutierrez-Reed’s very own text in a police interview just after the incident. “She says at the close: ‘I just, I do not know. I would like I would have checked it,’” Lewis explained to the jury. “And so do we.”
Jason Bowles, Gutierrez-Reed’s lawyer, stated that the established was rife with unsafe safety problems. “Just due to the fact there was a tragedy does not indicate that a crime was dedicated. It does not indicate that Hannah Gutierrez seriously prompted the crimes they have charged her with,” Bowles said, telling the jury that Baldwin had pointed the gun in Hutchins’s path. “What they experimented with to do, and what you are looking at in this courtroom currently, is making an attempt to blame it all on Hannah, the 24-12 months-old, for the reason that, why? For the reason that she’s an simple target. She’s the least potent person on that set.”
The most spectacular twist in her demo emerged when assistant director David Halls testified. Baldwin to begin with informed authorities that Gutierrez-Reed had given him the gun, but afterwards alleged it was Halls. When Halls — who previously pleaded no contest to negligent use of a lethal weapon in excess of the incident — testified, he advised jurors that Gutierrez-Reed handed the gun to Baldwin.