Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the Rust movie armorer now serving an 18-month sentence for the shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins , has lost her bid for a new trial and release from prison. In related rulings issued Monday, Santa Fe Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer said Gutierrez-Reed failed to persuade the court that her involuntary manslaughter conviction last March might have been averted if she had known about certain evidence that only came to light through the subsequent, related trial of Alec Baldwin on the same charge. In Baldwin’s case, his trial ended in the dramatic dismissal of his single involuntary manslaughter charge in July after Marlowe Sommer ruled prosecutors “unilaterally withheld” information related to a batch of ammunition turned over by a so-called good Samaritan the day Gutierrez-Reed was found guilty.
The batch of ammunition proved so critical to Baldwin’s prosecution because the individual who turned it over, Troy Teske, said it belonged to Gutierrez-Reed’s dad, famed movie armorer Thell Reed. The batch notably included Starline Brass cartridges with nickel primers that matched the live bullet that killed Hutchins. Baldwin’s lawyers argued that the suppressed evidence was key to their defense theory that Gutierrez-Reed’s dad gave Starline Brass cartridges with nickel primers to props supplier Seth Kenney – and that Kenney, a respected armorer, allegedly let some of the live cartridges slip into the boxes of inert dummy rounds that he.