Feel free to ignore if you don’t care about legal procedure/details.
The issue here is that once the judge found the evidence should have been turned over and thus constituted a Brady violation, she had to decide on sanctions. There are in general four types of sanctions - instruction to jury that the prosecution failed to turn over evidence it should have, not allowing prosecution to use the evidence, mistrial, or dismissal with prejudice. Dismissal is very rare, and requires a finding that there was “flagrant misconduct” by the prosecution and that the evidence was important enough that it created “substantial prejudice” to the defense.
Here, the prosecution had done lots of shady stuff, including a situation where the judge had found a prior Brady violation and had granted a lesser sanction where the jury was instruction about prosecutions failure.
The judge was clearly angry at the prosecution - I don’t think I’ve ever seen a judge this visibly angry at an attorney. This wasn’t just a mistake by the prosecution to turn something over, it was a conscious decision to bury it and mark it as not evidence related to the Rust investigation. Also, the prosecution made some straight bs arguments - implying that somehow it was a key question how defense became aware of the suppressed evidence (which doesn’t matter since even if defense had the evidence, Brady still requires prosecution to turn it over).
It looks like the biggest errors, besides that he was supposed to use a rubber gun in rehearsal were related to the First AD declaring the gun cold and the armorer not checking and handing the gun directly to Baldwin. That’s the armorer’s job to declare and she didn’t check the gun right before it was handed to Baldwin, which is standard protocol. He received a misdemeanor and 6 months probation over declaring that gun cold.
And yes, Baldwin is more culpable in this situation than a run of the mill actor because of his power. I still don’t think a run of the mill actor on a properly safety controlled set would ever be put in that situation. Baldwin certainly shouldn’t have been, but he helped create every one of the conditions that led to the tragedy.
I got this mostly from the comment section, but that is apparently the case. Actors aren’t qualified to know what rounds are in a movie set gun. That’s why the armorer is required to check and directly hand the gun to the actor. That didn’t happen here.
I don’t think this is right. The protocol on Rust was that 1) armorer loads and checks gun and 2) hands it to Assistant AD/Safety Coordinator (Halls) who double checks and hands to actor. I think that is fine and perhaps even better to have a second person be responsible for double checking gun before handing to actor. The issue is that both armorer and Hall screwed up and failed to assure no live ammo in gun.
How would the First AD be capable of making that assessment? I’m almost positive from what I read it’s a union regulation for the armorer to be the last person to touch the weapon.
IIRC he had some gun training to be qualified as the Safety Coordinator, but could be remembering this wrong. It’s also possible, that proper protocol could have been for him to check and then hand back to armorer before going to actor (there was some dispute here about who handed to Baldwin).
Did they ever identify where the live ammo came from in the first place? Seems like that would be a good place to start if you’re looking for someone to blame.
No, and that is what the concealed evidence went to.
Prosecutions theory is that armorer got the live ammunition from her dad (who is a famous gun trainer/armorer) and accidentally brought it in on her own.
Concealed evidence was that the company that supplied gun/ammo props had live ammo that matched the live ammo found on Rust. Defense wanted to argue that this is where the live ammo came from (and possibly imply that there may have been an effort to sabotage the armorer and get her fired by sneaking live ammo on set and mixing with the dummy rounds).
In the shady/conspiracy side, the prop company owner was very “cooperative” with the investigation, and in fact assisted them in searches and directing what they should be looking for. Defense implication is that he was doing this to point blame to armorer and absolve himself (possibly in cahoots with prosecution who were fixated on convicting Baldwin). At a minimum he was very sloppy with his handling of live ammo (holding it in random bags in unsecure locations with limited/no inventory records) and with his props (records didn’t come close to matching what he had delivered to Rust).
I read that the live ammo brought in was a clear not match to the ammo in the weapon, but that was coming from someone on the prosecutors’ side and doesn’t absolve the Brady violation.
Sort of. The live ammo that was concealed was an exact match for some of the dummy rounds found on Rust. It was a very close match to the live ammo found on Rust (same caliber and brand, but did have different type of primer - I think Brass vs. Silver). However, there was also evidence that at times the prop company would mix it’s ammo in terms of primer color, so implication is that this may not have been dispositive.
The judge was clearly pissed about the prosecution trying to make this distinction.
There was that article that gave some plausibility that Judge Cannon wasn’t in the tank for Trump, but that she was incompetent and overwhelmed. Well that seems to be not true.