The defense is claiming a “cover-up” is happening with evidence.
Alec Baldwin’s Santa Fe manslaughter trial veered into uncertain territory on Friday, July 12, when his lawyers asked the judge to toss the case over authorities’ alleged withholding of key evidence from the defense. Lawyers for Baldwin, who is charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of Rust cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, claim that police didn’t disclose evidence that could explain how live bullets wound up on the movie’s set. This revelation came on July 11 during the cross-examination of crime-scene tech Marissa Poppell, and was detailed in a subsequent motion to dismiss. Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer agreed to have a hearing about Baldwin’s push to dismiss; Seth Kenney, who provided guns, dummy rounds, and blanks to the production, was the first to testify. Before the hearing, Sommer sent the jury home, directing them to return on July 15.
Baldwin’s lawyers argued in their motion that the Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office and prosecutors “concealed” that the live round came from Kenney. The high-profile legal team then laid out a shocking chronology: Troy Teske, a retired police officer from Arizona, had “delivered a collection of live ammunition” to Poppell. Baldwin’s lawyers claim that the type of live ammunition matched “the live bullet that killed Hutchins.” Teske turned over the ammo after Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter on March 6, 2024.
According to the defense’s motion, authorities knew that Teske had information about Rust set ammunition for years. Kenney called Teske — who, like Kenney, was friends with Gutierrez-Reed’s father, famed armorer Thell Reed — during a police interview on November 1, 2021; after this sit-down, Teske sent authorities a photo of ammunition that didn’t match rounds found on the Rust set. Kenney then sent this photo to the then-case detective. In an interview with Teske the next day, a prosecutor asked him to provide ammunition from a batch Kenney had used elsewhere. Teske said he would turn it over, and the prosecutor said she would coordinate its collection, but authorities didn’t follow up.
Here’s where things get even messier: The defense said that Poppell’s supervisor told her to log the rounds “under a different case file so that it would never be disclosed to the defense.” The Sheriff’s Office didn’t disclose the rounds even though it has to disclose evidence to lawyers, even after Baldwin’s team asked to view all ballistics evidence. Poppell also said that the Sheriff’s Office created a report about the rounds “that also was never disclosed to the defense.” The defense described this as a “cover-up” in the motion.
“Baldwin was unaware of a risk that live ammunition had been brought to the set of Rust. To support its theory that Baldwin should have known of that risk, the State is attempting to establish a link between Baldwin and the source of the live ammunition,” the motion stated. “The only way it can do this is by demonstrating that the live rounds were brought to the set by the movie’s armorer, given the State’s assertion that Baldwin should have been aware of her youth and inexperience and therefore the possibility that she brought live rounds to set.”
“Evidence that the live rounds came from Kenney is therefore favorable to Baldwin, which is why the State buried it. The State not only failed to disclose the evidence — it affirmatively hid it under a file number that is unaffiliated with the Rust case and then failed to disclose the only documentation that it claims to have created that would have alerted Baldwin to the existence of the evidence,” the motion also stated.
During Kenney’s testimony in the hearing, he insisted that he’d handled tens of thousands of dummy rounds during his career without incident. He insisted that the live ammo on set did not come from him. “There was never a question in my mind that I provided the live ammunition to Rust,” he said.
Prosecutors have claimed that Hutchins’s death resulted from Baldwin’s recklessness, telling jurors that he flouted common-sense gun-safety principles by pointing the gun at her and pulling the trigger. When Baldwin’s team mentioned the seemingly missing bullets on July 12, prosecutor Kari Morrissey said she wasn’t aware of them. Baldwin’s team has said the actor was told it was a cold gun, meaning it didn’t have live ammunition — and that he wasn’t reckless but simply handled the weapon as countless actors have and continue to do while filming. The defense has repeatedly brought up alleged issues with evidence; they said the gun was destroyed during police analysis, making it impossible for them to determine whether it malfunctioned. They have also argued that authorities were more concerned with nabbing Baldwin than they were thoroughly investigating the tragic incident.
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