Once again Alec Baldwin is facing prison time for the fatal shooting on the set of Rust, which injured director Joel Souza and ended the life of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, after the disgraced actor is indicted by a grand jury in New Mexico.
Per Fox News, the New Mexico grand jury opted to charge Baldwin yet again with involuntary manslaughter charges, as a means to hold him accountable for the fatal on-set shooting that took place in October of 2021, noting that new evidence presented by special prosecutors Kari Morrissey and Jason Lewis made them re-revaluate the case.
On behalf of the Hutchins family, attorney Gloria Allred said on Friday, “Our clients have always sought the truth about what happened on the day that Halyna Hutchins was tragically shot and killed on October 21, 2021.”
“They continue to seek the truth in our civil lawsuit for them and they also would like there to be accountability in the criminal justice system,” she added, pointing out, “The grand jury has decided that there is sufficient evidence to indict Alec Baldwin on the charge of involuntary manslaughter.”
Allred continued, “We are looking forward to the criminal trial which will determine if [Alec Baldwin] should be convicted for the untimely death of Halyna, who was the daughter of our clients Olga Solovey and Anatolii Androsovych, the sister of Svetlana Zemko, and the co-worker of our client, Mamie Mitchell.”
Addressing the grand jury’s decision, Baldwin’s attorneys Luke Nikas and Alex Spiro simply declared, “We look forward to our day in court.”
Were the actor to be found guilty of these new involuntary manslaughter charges failed against him, Baldwin could face up to 18 months in prison for the killing of Hutchins and injuring of Souza.
The first favorable turn for the actor came in February of 2023, after having been formally charged in January of that same year alongside Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, when the Santa Fe District Attorney’s office formally announced that Baldwin was no longer facing the five-year minimum jail sentence as the charges filed against him were downgraded.
A few months later, in April of 2023, prosecutors dropped all manslaughter charges filed against Baldwin. The tables would turn for the disgraced actor just a few months later.
According to a report from Deadline, special prosecutors Morrissey and Lewis issued a statement in October, declaring that new information that had come to light could end up putting Baldwin in a tight spot.
“After extensive investigation over the past several months, additional facts have come to light that we believe show Mr. Baldwin has criminal culpability in the death of Halyna Hutchins and the shooting of Joel Souza,” the prosecutors said.
The statement added, “We believe the appropriate course of action is to permit a panel of New Mexico citizens to determine from here whether Mr. Baldwin should be held over for criminal trial.”
At the time, Nikas and Spiro responded to the statement, accusing, “It is unfortunate that a terrible tragedy has been turned into this misguided prosecution,” and assuring that they “will answer any charges in court.”
Baldwin has claimed that he did not pull the trigger of the gun that killed Hutchins. In a now infamous interview with ABC News’ George Stephanpoulos, however, the actor was seen contradicting his own recollection of the tragic event.
“So I take the gun and I start to cock the gun. I’m not going to pull the trigger,” he alleged at the time. “I said, ‘Do you see this?’ She says, ‘Well, just cheat it down and tilt it down a little bit like that.’ And I cock the gun and I go, ‘Can you see that? Can you see that? Can you see that?’ And she says…and I let go of the hammer of the gun and the gun goes off. I let go of the hammer of the gun and the gun goes off.”
In his recounting of the event, Baldwin would go on to contradict this version of the story, claiming that did not cock the gun, noting that he remembered pulling “the hammer as far back as I could without cocking the actual…”
