QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The failure to disclose the ammunition posed a major legal problem because the state is required to turn over key evidence to the defense. “They buried it,” Luke Nikas, a lawyer for Mr. Baldwin, said in court. “They put it under a different case with a different number.”
STORY" ‘Rust’ Case Against Alec Baldwin Is Dismissed Over Withheld Evidence, by Reporter Julia Jacobs, published by The New York Times, on July 12, 2024. (Julia Jacobs covers breaking news related to the arts and culture and her work often involves reporting on civil lawsuits and criminal cases);
SUB-HEADING: "The involuntary manslaughter case against Mr. Baldwin fell apart after an envelope of ammunition that the prosecution had not shown the defense was brought into the courtroom.
GIST: "A judge in New Mexico dismissed the case against Alec Baldwin on Friday after finding that the state had withheld evidence that could have shed light on how live rounds got onto a film set where the cinematographer was fatally shot.
The dismissal was with prejudice, meaning that the prosecution of Mr. Baldwin is over. If he had been convicted of involuntary manslaughter, Mr. Baldwin would have faced up to 18 months in prison.
“There is no way for the court to right this wrong,” Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer said in court as Mr. Baldwin wept.
It was a stunning end to the trial of Mr. Baldwin, who was rehearsing with a gun on the “Rust” film set in 2021 when it fired a live round, killing Halyna Hutchins, the movie’s cinematographer. Mr. Baldwin had been told the gun was “cold,” meaning it had no live ammunition.
The dismissal followed a dramatic scene when the lead prosecutor, Kari T. Morrissey, went from questioning witnesses to taking the stand herself.
She gave an account of why a batch of ammunition that had been turned in to the state several months ago by a witness who claimed it was related to the “Rust” shooting had been put in an entirely different case file and was not handed over to the defense.
“It was my impression that they did not match the live rounds from the set of ‘Rust,’” Ms. Morrissey said on the stand, saying that she had only viewed a photo of the ammunition.
But when the ammunition was brought into the courtroom earlier Friday at the judge’s request it became clear that some of the rounds resembled those found on the “Rust” set.
The new evidence was brought into the courtroom in a manila envelope. Judge Marlowe Sommer put on blue latex gloves, cut it open with a pair of scissors and got down from the bench to examine the ammunition inside in the well of the courtroom as the prosecution and defense surrounded her. The examination determined that three of the rounds did, in fact, resemble the live rounds found on the set of “Rust” after the shooting.
“I never saw them until today,” Ms. Morrissey testified when she took the stand.
The failure to disclose the ammunition posed a major legal problem because the state is required to turn over key evidence to the defense.
“They buried it,” Luke Nikas, a lawyer for Mr. Baldwin, said in court. “They put it under a different case with a different number.”
The judge’s order lifted a significant weight from Mr. Baldwin, a television and movie star whose life and career has been under a shadow of potential criminal liability for nearly three years, as the case against him has gone through a series of twists and turns.
Mr. Baldwin still faces civil lawsuits, including one from Ms. Hutchins’s husband, Matthew Hutchins. Although a settlement was announced in that case, it has not been fully resolved.
“We respect the court’s decision,” a lawyer for Mr. Hutchins, Brian J. Panish, said in a statement on Friday. “We look forward to presenting all the evidence to a jury and holding Mr. Baldwin accountable for his actions in the senseless death of Halyna Hutchins.”
Mr. Baldwin has vehemently denied responsibility for Ms. Hutchins’s death, saying that he had no reason to believe that the gun he was handed on set that day could have been loaded with live ammunition. Live rounds are generally banned on film sets, and witnesses said that the gun was declared “cold.”
Lawyers for Mr. Baldwin fought the criminal prosecution at every turn, filing motions to dismiss over the grand jury proceedings, the legal theory of the case and the F.B.I. testing that broke key internal parts of the gun. But the judge rejected each of their attempts, until the latest one.
Ms. Morrissey had blamed the movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, for the live rounds, which the armorer denied. Ms. Gutierrez-Reed was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for loading the live round into the gun that Mr. Baldwin was rehearsing with, and is currently serving 18 months in prison.
The ammunition examined in court on Friday came from a man named Troy Teske, a friend of Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s stepfather, Thell Reed, who is a well-known Hollywood armorer.
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, Marissa Poppell, testified that she had spoken to Mr. Teske and saved the ammunition, but that she put it under a different case number than the “Rust” case.
Ms. Morrissey said in court that, after viewing a photo provided by Mr. Teske, 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. And under questioning from Ms. Morrissey on Thursday, Ms. Poppell said the rounds that Mr. Teske had brought to the sheriff’s office looked dissimilar to the live rounds found on the “Rust” set.
But when the ammunition was brought into court, and it became clear that some resembled the ammunition collected on the set, Judge Marlowe Sommer sent the jury home for the weekend and continued the hearing on whether the evidence had been mishandled. She found that it had.
“The state’s willful withholding of this information was intentional and deliberate,” Judge Marlowe Sommer said. “If this conduct does not rise to the level of bad faith, it certainly comes so near to bad faith as to show signs of scorching prejudice.”
While on the stand, Ms. Morrissey acknowledged that the other special prosecutor, Erlinda O. Johnson, had resigned from the case. Ms. Johnson walked out of the proceedings earlier Friday, the third day of the trial, after conferring with the judge; she did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As Ms. Morrissey left the courthouse on Friday, she told a crowd of reporters and TV cameras that “there is absolutely no evidence that any of that ammunition is related to the incident involving Ms. Hutchins.”
She added, “I understand that the court disagrees with me, and I respect the court’s decision.”
That decision was the latest twist in a case that has had many. After Mr. Baldwin was first charged in January 2023, the manslaughter charge was downgraded as prosecutors acknowledged that it was based on a law that did not exist at the time of the shooting.
Then, the special prosecutor handling the case stepped down after Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers argued that her appointment violated the State Constitution because she also served in another branch of government, as a state lawmaker.
A new prosecution team took over, and it temporarily dismissed the charges against Mr. Baldwin after his lawyers argued that the gun might have been modified in such a way that made it more likely to discharge without pulling the trigger. When a forensic report undermined that claim, the new prosecution team, led by Ms. Morrissey, decided to take the case to a grand jury, which indicted Mr. Baldwin on a charge of involuntary manslaughter.
There had been signs of tensions behind the scenes and criticism of the investigation. Robert Shilling, a former chief of the New Mexico State Police who worked as an investigator for the district attorney’s office before being removed from the case, sharply criticized the investigation in an email to prosecutors that later became public.
“The conduct of the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office during and after their initial investigation is reprehensible and unprofessional to a degree I still have no words for,” he wrote in the email. “Not I or 200 more proficient investigators than I can/could clean up the mess delivered to your office in October 2022 (1 year since the initial incident … inexcusable).”
During the court proceedings on Friday, as it looked increasingly possible that the new evidence could disrupt the case, Mr. Baldwin seemed to relax somewhat after two days of trial that had drawn dozens of journalists to the courthouse and thousands more spectators to the livestream of the trial online.
When the case was dismissed, Mr. Baldwin, openly weeping, turned around and embraced his wife, Hilaria Baldwin, before walking out of court a free man."
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/arts/rust-trial-pause-alec-baldwin-shooting.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
ASSAGE OF THE DAY:
STORY: "Frank Gable sues 24 investigators, alleging they framed him for state prison chief’s killing," by Reporter Maxine Bernstein, published by The Oregonian, one July 12, 2024. (Maxine Bernstein covers federal court and criminal justice.)
PHOTO CAPTION: "Frank Gable was released from Lansing Correctional Facility in Kansas on June 28, 2019. He lives with his wife in Kansas and is working to rebuild his life, his lawyer said.
GIST: :"Frank Gable on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit against 24 police officers, claiming their improper tactics led to his wrongful conviction in the 1989 killing of Oregon’s prisons chief.
The suit alleges officers with Oregon State Police and the Salem Police Department engaged in malicious prosecution and violated his due process rights, resulting in his 29 years and 81 days of imprisonment for the murder of Michael Francke, director of Oregon’s Department of Corrections.
An officer “choked” Gable during one interrogation “until he lost consciousness” and others used “selective recordings to falsely suggest” that he made statements incriminating himself, the suit alleges. It also alleges the officers suppressed evidence that would have undermined his prosecution.
“They went to a lot of extreme ends to coerce a confession from Mr. Gable, but he’s maintained his innocence throughout,” his attorney Megan Pierce said.
Gable, a local methamphetamine dealer at the time, was sentenced in 1991 to life in prison without the possibility of parole in Francke’s murder.
Francke, 42, bled to death from stab wounds and was found dead on the north porch of the Dome Building, where he worked in Salem. The door of his nearby state-issued Pontiac stood open.
U.S. Magistrate Judge John V. Acosta threw out Gable’s conviction in 2019, ruling that he didn’t get a fair trial. Acosta noted that another man’s confession to the crime was excluded during Gable’s trial.
Acosta found that no reasonable juror would have convicted Gable in light of another man’s multiple confessions to Francke’s killing and because nearly all the witnesses in the case had recanted their testimony since the trial. Acosta also found that Gable’s conviction resulted from improper interrogation of witnesses by investigators and flawed polygraphs that further shaped witness statements to police.
In May 2023, Acosta ordered the state to “completely expunge” all records of Gable’s prosecution, citing the extraordinary circumstances of his “constitutionally invalid” conviction. He also granted Gable unconditional release from custody and barred the state from retrying him in the case after ordering Marion County to dismiss his murder indictment with prejudice, meaning the state couldn’t bring future charges against Gable.
“Plaintiff spent almost 30 years in prison for a crime he did not commit,” Pierce wrote in the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Eugene. “Defendants built a case against Plaintiff based on nothing but false, fabricated evidence that was the product of unlawful investigative techniques.”
The suit alleges the officers engaged in an unconstitutional conspiracy to deprive Gable of his rights, failed to intervene and halt the improper tactics and were negligent in their investigation and supervision of officers to prohibit misconduct.
Pierce said everyone named as defendants was “directly involved in misconduct that resulted in Mr. Gable’s wrongful prosecution.” They were identified as defendants in the suit in place of the state, which is shielded by immunity from such damages in federal court.
It seeks unspecified damages for Gable’s claims.
Gable separately is seeking more than $2 million from the state of Oregon to compensate him for the time he spent in prison. The state, so far, is challenging the compensation. It has argued unsuccessfully in prior court hearings that Gable and his lawyers failed to meet the legal threshold for showing Gable didn’t commit the fatal stabbing in 1989.
Gable was released from Lansing Correctional Facility in Kansas on June 28, 2019. He lives with his wife in Kansas and is working to rebuild his life, Pierce said. He will turn 65 next month.
“He’s still struggling with all the physical and emotional damage and injury he suffered from three decades of incarceration in harsh and difficult conditions,” Pierce said. “The issue of Mr. Gable’s innocence has been litigated thoroughly in post-conviction proceedings. We are really hopeful the state will do the right thing and make Mr. Gable whole for the injuries the defendants in this case caused him.”
Gable has since changed his name to Franke J. Different Cloud, but has used his former name in the legal filings.
The dismissal of all charges against Gable has left Francke’s killing unsolved."
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
