Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/16/rust-armorer-gets-18-months-in-jail.html
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We don’t even have a review of the movie and it’s already a long-running tragedy.
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I’ll repeat my comment from the Follow-Up thread:
She got the maximum sentence in part because of statements she made during jailhouse phone calls that were recorded. She called the jurors “idiots”, said the judge was on a “power trip” and accused her of having been paid off. And then there’s this bit, from the NYT article:
In court papers, prosecutors detailed jail calls in which Ms. Gutierrez-Reed contended that she “didn’t need to be shaking the dummies all the time,” referring to a safety measure in which weapons specialists shake inert cartridges, called dummy rounds, to hear a rattle inside, which indicates that the round cannot fire from the gun. On the day of the shooting, Ms. Gutierrez-Reed was supposed to have loaded six dummy rounds in Mr. Baldwin’s revolver, but one ended up being live.
“Every time a gun was loaded with ‘dummy’ rounds, it was a game of Russian roulette,” the lead prosecutor, Kari T. Morrissey, wrote in a court filing ahead of the sentencing.
In a separate call, prosecutors said, Ms. Gutierrez-Reed said she was trying to get her lawyer’s paralegal to reach out to Ms. Hutchins’s family about speaking on her behalf at the sentencing hearing. She also said she wants prosecutors to “put Alec Baldwin in jail.”
She hasn’t accepted an ounce of responsibility and she’s shown no remorse.
ETA: If you ever find yourself in jail, whether for something you actually did or some bullshit, be aware that any phone call you have with anyone outside the jail is going to be recorded and can be used against you. The police don’t need a warrant for that. The only conversations you can have that are protected are the ones you have in person with your attorney.
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Phone calls with your attorney don’t count? Dip. I will definitely make a note of that.
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A little remorse and less hubris can go a long way with sentencing.
I wonder if Alec Baldwin can act remorseful. He may have cooked himself with those interviews.
On one hand I get it that you don’t want to think you did anything wrong that ended up killing someone. It had to be someone else’s fault. It was a stacked tolerances of safety failures that lead to it. I also understand you have to deny your responsibility if you are arguing “not guilty” in court. But if the jury finds you guilty, some culpability and remorse is going to go a long way with some judges.It certainly won’t hurt you in the court of public opinion.
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Is that just out of pure spite or has her legal defense put forward some kind of legal argument that makes the claim that
- This was an unforseeable freak accident that the armorer can’t be held responsible for
and - Baldwin IS somehow responsible in some way other than hiring a grossly incompetent armorer and fostering an unsafe environment on set that the armorer was powerless to change.
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Wow. And here without knowing these details I thought that 18 months sounded pretty light to me.
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I still want to know how live ammunition gets on set and gets mixed in with dummy rounds. Was it that live ammunition was legitimately used at some point in the production (which sounds unnecessarily risky to me) or is it just that in New Mexico everyone has so much live ammo stuffed in their pockets all the time that sooner or later things inevitably get mixed up?
I understand that there can be at least two types of ammunition on set: blanks, which are legitimately dangerous (I’ve seen someone hit by fragments of wadding from a rifle blank; the hit drew blood, but fortunately that was all), and dummies, which don’t go bang at all, but look appropriately bullet-shaped. It’s the armorer’s job to keep a close eye on those two, and getting them mixed up would be a serious professional fault. But the idea that live rounds can sneak on set and finish up in a working prop gun implies either a deeply fucked-up process or actual malice.
I guess it’s a case of “assume every gun is loaded until proven otherwise (and then still assume it’s loaded),” and the armorer is supposed to stay on top of that, however unlikely it might seem.
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I don’t know what the sentencing guidelines are, but if I had to guess, I would think that a lack of a prior criminal history probably helped. And it’s involuntary manslaughter, not voluntary, so there was no intent to kill, just negligence.
Both. Her defense was both of those. In the case of the production, she was arguing that she wasn’t provided with the resources needed to do her job properly. Of course, the jailhouse phone recordings completely contradicted that, thus the maximum sentence.
I don’t know that this is good or bad news for Baldwin. I will say, he better do two things between now and trial: 1) Shut the fuck up. 2) If he does talk to anyone about this, show some remorse. That second one can be tricky, though, which is why he should shut up. There’s a fine line between expressing remorse and admitting guilt and it’s pretty easy to cross that line.
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I agree. I don’t understand why an armourer would have any live rounds on a movie set at all.
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Or why they can’t shake them all.
It’s weird that the simple job wasn’t done right. And the finger pointing at Baldwin is odd too. Was there something in the story about the armorer being overworked? Like were they also catering and transportation?
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Yet again demonstrating that every safety regulation is written in blood. And this one is especially galling, because I can’t see it taking more than 30 seconds to check six dummy rounds.
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According to this, live rounds were mixed in a box of dummy rounds, and it’s not clear if that box came from Gutierrez-Reed or another ammunition supplier. Notably, if it was that other supplier, it seems that the live rounds may have gotten mixed in as part of a production where her stepfather was the armorer. And all of that makes me think that her lack of safety chops is learned behavior.
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I imagine you pull the round out of the box, shake it, load it in the chamber. Fractions of a second per round. Such a hassle I’m sure. Not to mention it’s her fucking job. Nepotism strikes again.
Edit from her wiki:
She worked with actor Nicolas Cage, who stormed off the set after a gun in Gutierrez-Reed’s care went off near the crew for the second day in a row, yelling, “Make an announcement, you just blew my fucking eardrums out!”[3] At that time key grip Stu Brumbaugh encouraged the assistant director to let Gutierrez-Reed go.[3]
Jesus.
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Yeah, I was being very conservative, allowing for an extremely methodical approach. And that anecdote makes me wonder even more about her stepfather, and if he’s had similar incidents that haven’t been widely discussed because his mistakes never ended up in someone’s death. Because I have a hard time believing that a person could learn the trade from someone who was extremely safety conscious and stressed that you’re dealing with matters of life and death, and still have multiple fuckups like this.
One accidental discharge, even if it was “only” a blank, should be a pants-shitting moment. It shouldn’t be followed up by one the next day, and it definitely shouldn’t be followed up by negligent homicide a few months later. Normally the time after an accident is when things are safest, because everyone involved or who heard about it doesn’t want to fuck up again. This is a baffling level of negligence.
Edit: From this 2021 interview with Thell Reed:
Sharpshooter and movie consultant Thell Reed said he’s not concerned about the possibility that his 24-year-old daughter, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, could go to jail.
Welp.
Reed said his daughter should have been called into the church for the rehearsal and that if she had, the tragedy could have been avoided. “That one time they should have had her on set, she would’ve rechecked that gun,” he told ABC News. “If there was a live round placed there, she would’ve found it.”
Seems like maybe she wouldn’t have, given her calls.
“She knows what to do,” he added. “She does the job as good as I do now.”
… “She didn’t need anymore training, she’s got me,” Reed told ABC News.
And there it is.
Both Reed and his daughter’s attorney said they believe sabotage was behind the fatal incident. “Sabotage is the most likely possibility, probability,” Bowles told ABC News. “Somebody wanted to cause a safety incident on set. Nobody wanted anybody to be killed. We developed evidence of motive for that – why they might’ve wanted to do that, why Hannah might’ve been a target – and that’s all gone to the sheriff and we’re asking for that to be completed before any decisions are made on charging.”
“Sabotage” happen on a lot of your films, my guy?
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I had read a while back, so my memory is fuzzy and more info may have come out since then, that she and others had brought live rounds out to shoot around after work and do target practice in the desert.
Found the article, but the statements seem to be unconfirmed per Wikipedia.
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