Emmy award-winning actor Alec Baldwin has lost his last-ditch effort to have an involuntary manslaughter charge against him dismissed before going to trial this month, the BBC reports.
The 66-year-old is accused of killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on set in the US state of New Mexico, in 2021 – after firing a revolver being used as a prop. Baldwin has pleaded not guilty, claiming he did not pull the trigger and does not know how live ammunition ended up in the gun.
On Friday, New Mexico District Court Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer denied the actor’s bid to have the case dismissed.
She said that a jury would decide “whether the defendant had a criminally negligent state of mind” when the shooting incident happened. Jury selection for the trial is scheduled to begin on 9 July.
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The crew member in charge of firearms during the making of the film, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, has already been sentenced to 18 months in prison on the same involuntary manslaughter charge Baldwin faces.
“The fact that live ammunition was allowed on a movie set, that guns and ammunition were left unattended… and that defendant Baldwin inexplicably pointed and fired a gun at Halyna Hutchins, makes this a case where injury or death was much more than just a possibility – it was a likely result,” the lawsuit reads.
Baldwin’s lawyers have argued that the case against their client should be dropped because the revolver in question had since been destroyed by an FBI examiner during a forensic analysis. But prosecutors countered that as all parts of the gun were still available, Baldwin’s team still had ample evidence at hand to go ahead with their defence.
The movie being made at the time of the incident was a Western, titled Rust, and based on a story Baldwin created with writer and director Joel Souza – who was wounded by the same bullet that killed Hutchins.
