Rust armourer sentenced to 18 months in prison after being found guilty for role played in Halyna Hutchins’ death
The armourer from Rust, where Alec Baldwin shot and killed Halyna Hutchins, has been sentenced after being found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was found guilty last month for the role she played in Hutchins’ death on the New Mexico set of the film.
She was also previously acquitted on a charge of evidence tampering.
The 27-year-old received a sentence of 18 months of incarceration.
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Gutierrez-Reed had pled not guilty, and defence lawyers argued that she was a ‘scapegoat’ for the incident.
Baldwin was pointing a proper gun at the cinematographer Hutchins during a rehearsal in late 2021, when the firearm went off.
This shot killed Hutchins, and injured director Joel Souza.
The prosecution argued throughout the trial that Gutierrez-Reed was ‘sloppy’ by her colleagues, and claimed that live rounds allegedly brought from her home were found on the film set.
Prosecutor Kari Morrissey said in the trial’s closing statement: “She was negligent, she was careless, she was thoughtless.”
She went on to state that the armourer showed an ‘astounding lack of diligence’.
Morrissey has slammed Gutierrez-Reed in the days since the trial, after it was reportedly revealed that the 27-year-old had hit out at the jury and judge in recorded phone calls from jail.
The prosecutor called for the maximum possible sentence for the armourer, stating the calls showed a clear lack of remorse.
Gutierrez-Reed said that the jury were ‘idiots’ and that she was being ‘railroaded’, while also claiming that the judge had been ‘paid off’.
"You alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon," Judge Sommer said while handed out the sentence.
"I find that what you did constitutes a serious violent offence, it was committed in a physically violent manner. A fatal gunshot done with your recklessness in the face of knowledge that your acts were reasonably likely to result in serious harm.
“You were the armourer, the one that stood between a safe weapon and a weapon that could kill someone.
"But for you, Ms. Hutchins would be alive. A husband would have his partner, and a little boy would have his mother."
Alec Baldwin will go on trial later this year, with the actor also having been charged with ‘involuntary manslaughter’.
Baldwin was a producer on the set and has been accused being negligent or showing a ‘total disregard or indifference for safety’.
The actor has claimed repeatedly that he did not pull the trigger and that the gun malfunctioned, however, that is disputed by Gutierrez-Reed’s defence team.
The gun in question was a working .45 revolver, with the prosecution in the 27-year-old’s case claiming it contained one live round, and several dummy rounds.
A GoFundMe page, set up by Gutierrez-Reed’s father has also been shut down in recent weeks.
Her father set up the page to pay for the costs of a potential appeal.
He stated: “It’s quite transparent, the judicial scales in Hannah’s case are unfair and unbalanced.
“Justice for Halyna does not mean injustice for Hannah.”
The GoFundMe was shut down for violating the website’s rules about fundraising for legal defence against charges ‘related to violent crimes’.
Topics: Crime, US News, News, TV and Film
Olivia Burke