Alec Baldwin Will Be Charged with Involuntary Manslaughter in ‘Rust’ Killing
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I found this which shows comparisons of bullets and blanks. There is a mention in one of the posts of BBs being installed to give a rattle. It says blanks are not to be used at close range and not to be pointed at anyone. A cold gun is supposed to be an unloaded gun and not a gun with a blank?
https://www.quora.com/When-talking-about-bullets-or-rounds-w...
But what stands out is how blanks and shotshell look the same.
If the accident on the set used a bullet, that should have been visibly noticeable. The call was that it was a cold gun, but the article doesn't give an example of what was used. Anyone have info on that?
He's being charged as the head of production, not as the actor who was unfortunate enough to pull the trigger. The fact that he's both is just a cruel twist of fate.
Cruelty is reserved for the grief of the individual who had their life abruptly ended, and the grief of family of the deceased.
Other actors — including "A-list" celebrities — consulted by prosecutors said they "always check their guns or have someone check it in front of them," Carmack-Altwies told CNN shortly after announcing her intention to file involuntary manslaughter charges. Every person that handles a gun has a duty to make sure that if they're going to handle that gun, point it at someone and pull the trigger, that it is not going to fire a projectile and kill someone," she said. She added, "An actor does not get a free pass just because they are an actor. That is what is so important. We are saying here in New Mexico, that everyone is equal under the law."
The piece goes on to note that the “criminal liability as a producer” case would have different requirements than the “criminal liability as an actor” case, presumably because one case would need to argue that on-set safety was actually Baldwin’s responsibility and he was specifically negligent in that duty. But based on the DA’s quotes it looks like she is going for a very broad theory of liability that mixes the two roles up (ie as the producer he should have known to take special care when handed a cold gun as an actor.) It says that CNN’s legal expert found the case to be very unusual, FWIW. I’ll be honest that this case has a whiff of “small town DA wanting to get a bigger political profile” to it, but I guess we’ll see.
[1] https://www.kcra.com/amp/article/alec-baldwin-rust-charges-w...
Gun safety etiquette dictates that the handler is always responsible for their own ammo. Alec the actor should definitely not get a free pass. I didn't realize there were criminal ramifications too.
Alec the producer is guilty of a far worse crime IMO. It could have easily been someone else who pulled the trigger.
I’m no expert, but my understanding is that film sets need to allow actors to use guns in specific ways that would never be acceptable in normal gun ownership, such as to point (“cold”) props at people and pull the trigger. To enable this specialized usage the industry has developed a very specific set of safety standards tailored to this use-case. It involves hiring specially-trained professional armorers to manage all of the prop weapons on the set, and it also puts in place a new set of communication procedures to ensure that armorers can communicate with actors to let them know when they’re dealing with an unsafe weapon. From what I can tell, Baldwin the actor followed these safety procedures exactly as expected.
There is a separate question of whether Baldwin the executive producer has liability. To answer that you can’t just say “but he has a producer credit!” You’d need to actually show that (1) he had responsibility over hiring or on-set safety, and separately that (2) in that role he was negligent. It’s not really clear that an executive producer has that responsibility, usually it’s just a meaningless vanity credit.
What’s confusing about this case (from what I can tell) is that the DA realizes that both of these individual cases is kind of weak. And so instead she’s going for a hybrid case where Baldwin the actor followed the normal safety standards, but this isn’t sufficient because he somehow has to follow a non-standard (higher) set of safety standards because “as the producer he should have been aware that the professional armorer wasn’t trustworthy.” I’m not saying this argument is wrong, exactly. But I think it’s vague enough that it might allow a jury to disregard the legal safety requirements and invent new ones out of whole cloth.
PS I find this case fascinating and I don’t apologize for it! But I do apologize for the long post.
I'm pretty sure that being the film's producer he is liable.
If you aren't willing to learn the difference between dummy rounds, blanks, and live rounds, then you shouldn't be pointing firearms at people and pulling the trigger.
Ultimately, though, as someone that is very familiar with guns, I have a hard time sympathizing with Baldwin. You brought real guns onto the set, and you pointed them at people. Primarily people that had no business having the guns pointed at them. It wasn't even another actor during filming, which I would have at least understood to some degree. It seems like the perfect storm of things had happened for him to "accidentally" kill this person he didn't like.
At the end of the day, any actors / set workers handling real firearms should have thorough training before using them. Trigger discipline, how to check the chamber, identifying cartridge types, emptying the chamber before setting it down, not aiming at people who aren't even actors...
the scene involved pointing the gun towards the camera, which means the gun is pointing towards the crew.
> Trigger discipline
How do you maintain trigger discipline when the scene requires you to point a gun at someone, or in someones general direction, with your finger on the trigger?
> check the chamber, identifying cartridge types, emptying the chamber before setting it down
If an actor tries to check the chamber, messes with the cartridges, the gun immediately goes back to the armorer to be made safe before being handed back to the actor, if the actor check again, guess what happens?
It's very important to understand that on a film set the standard rules do not apply, or more precisely the rules apply in different ways.
I hope this tragedy serves as a lesson for those who are “anti-gun” who seem to think there’s nobility in being willfully ignorant about a simple mechanical device.
Given how much thought, refinement and bloodshed are behind those rules, to not follow them seems immoral. Anyone handling a gun has a moral obligation to following the safety rules. Do to otherwise is criminal negligence.
I.e. I can understand the perspective that not checking a gun you are handed is always gross negligence even though I have friends that I don't think would know that.
EDITED TO ADD:
With the caveat that IANANML... the bottom line is that "Involuntary manslaughter consists . . . of a lawful act which might produce death . . . without due caution and circumspection." This is satisfied by "Negligent use of a deadly weapon [including] endangering the safety of another by handling or using a firearm or other deadly weapon in a negligent manner," which "means omitting to do something which a reasonable man, guided by those considerations which ordinarily regulate the conduct of human affairs, would do, or doing something which a prudent and reasonable man would not do."
https://law.justia.com/codes/new-mexico/2021/chapter-30/arti... https://law.justia.com/codes/new-mexico/2021/chapter-30/arti... https://casetext.com/case/state-v-franklin-317
A prudent and reasonable man would not point a loaded weapon at a cinematographer and pull the trigger, or even have his finger on the trigger, even in jest, and certainly not do so without verifying that the round in the chamber was a dummy round.
The fact that there had already been two negligent discharges mere days before makes this all the more repugnant. Not only was Baldwin negligent, he knew he was negligent, and did nothing to fix it.
So you personally inspect your car for suitability, your food for safety, all amusement parks, buildings, tools, etc that you come into contact with? Yes, modern society would not be possible without outsourced responsibility.
>Negligence does not differ for actors.
Of course it does. Those with more knowledge and training are held to higher standards in specific contexts. That's why we have licensing and such. The question is how do guns fit into this context.
I'm a Harvard-trained lawyer with over 15 years of criminal litigation experience, including in homicide. I have a former client right now serving a sentence for involuntary manslaughter (he was originally charged with murder).
You don't need to listen to me. I have neither the ability nor the desire to force you to listen to me. But I promise you I know what I'm talking about.
* All guns are always loaded
* Never point the gun at anything you are not willing to destroy.
* Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on target (and you have made the decision to shoot).
* Be sure of your target and what is beyond it.However, this article has very strange wording in it, "Mr. Baldwin, [played] former President Donald J. Trump on "Saturday Night Live"", but later, "Ms. Reeb, the special prosecutor, who is also a Republican"; is NYT trying to accuse the prosecutor of making this political?
Specific to this article they're saying "the Republican special prosecutor has good reasons to do this (that aren't political)" to cut that argument off.
There has been an increase of self-defense related shootings in New Mexico, and although the state has usually acknowledged some form of castle doctrine in your own home that isn't typically tempered by any duty to retreat. Gun violence, and crime in general, is fairly high in New Mexico, and is likely responsible for the increase of self-defense cases, but nevertheless, that state has been filing charges, or at least mulling them over in traditional self-defense instances.
Here's one from earlier this year: https://www.kob.com/new-mexico/suspect-killed-in-double-home...
I can't find the specific article I read back when this happened, but they all said something about the DA was debating on whether to file charges or not.
It may seem like Alec Baldwin may be a victim of this crackdown, and perhaps he is being used politically as a show of force in their effort to curb gun crime, but I think as the producer of this film, he would've been charged before the crackdown, and likely would faces charges in most states.