PoliticsMonday 04.15.24

Judge admonishes armorer in fatal “Rust” movie set shooting and gives her maximum sentence of 18 months in prison.

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Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer in the fatal “Rust” movie set shooting, got the maximum sentence of 18 months in prison on Monday for involuntary manslaughter in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer admonished Gutierrez-Reed for her actions and accused her of not taking accountability.

“You said you were sorry. You were sorry, but not you were sorry for what you did. ... It was your attorney that had to tell the court that you were remorseful,” Sommer said. “The word remorse: a deep regret coming from a sense of guilt for past wrongs. That's not you.”

Gutierrez-Reed brought live rounds onto the set of “Rust” and did not properly check dummy rounds before the deadly shooting on October 21, 2021, prosecutors said. Authorities said she loaded a live round into a prop gun and handed it off to actor Alec Baldwin before the gun fired, killing Hutchins. Baldwin has denied wrongdoing and claims that he never pulled the trigger before the gun fired.

“I find that what you did constitutes a serious violent offense. It was committed in a physically violent manner, a fatal gunshot done with your recklessness in the face of knowledge that your acts were reasonably likely to result in serious harm,” Sommers said.

“You were the armorer, the one that stood between a safe weapon and a weapon that could kill someone. You alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon,” Sommers continued. “But for you, Ms. Hutchins would be alive, a husband would have his partner, and a little boy would have his mother.”

Recount Wire

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