Today is the first day of the Alec Baldwin involuntary manslaughter trial, over his shooting dead cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the movie set of low-budget western “Rust” on October 21, 2021.
This live stream is the Day 1 summary of today’s events and testimony, which I hope to keep as concise was possible.
We’ll be back tomorrow morning with real-time streaming of Day 2 of the Alec Baldwin manslaughter trial.
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Transcript
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NOTE: All LOSD video/podcast transcripts are prepared in rough form, provided solely for our members’ convenience & documentation, and are not thoroughly reviewed for accuracy. Refer to the original video/podcast for the authoritative form of this content.
Welcome everybody. Welcome to the Third Law of self defense Show of the Day. What a marathon, what a marathon.
So we’re here, of course for our trial, Alec Baldwin manslaughter, trial day one live summary, I’ll try to keep this concise. Uh but I do want to give the highlights of what happened today, kind of my takeaway and the lessons and insights. Um For those of you who can’t watch every minute of the trial, just a quick overview of how things went today and how things went today.
It’s kind of like this immature. It’s uh yeah, that’s Alec with his head in his hands. It got pretty ugly sometimes.
So let’s go ahead and uh dive in. I have some prepared notes to make sure I hit the highlights, feel free to pose questions. Uh I’ll answer them as best I can. By the way, there was one technical question that came in earlier and I forgot to address it. Someone was asking me about this whole issue of uh publishing to the jury.
What does it mean to publish evidence to the jury? After all, we already admit evidence, it has to be admitted into court by the judge. What’s this publishing thing? Uh, well, you offer evidence to the court and then the other party can object to that evidence on various grounds. Relevancy.
Prejudice, probative this. Uh, and then the judge makes a call about whether she believes the evidence is sufficiently probative, relevant, not excessively prejudicial to be allowed in, uh, isn’t somehow privileged and so forth. So, what the judge is saying there is, ok, I’ve, I’ve cleared this for entry into the court, but that’s not the same thing as presenting it to the jury because you have to keep in mind everything in the trial court, every, every legal argument made, every piece of evidence made has to have an evidentiary foundation. So for example, you might have a um a photograph of a crime scene, right? It’s the gun found on the floor of the crime scene. It’s clearly relevant to this homicide that’s occurred. So the judge looks at that, she says, all right, this is relevant.
I can see how it’s relevant to the material facts of the criminal charge or the legal defenses. Uh I’m going to allow this into evidences court, but that doesn’t mean you can take that picture and just throw it in front of the jury. You have to have foundation for that evidence.
So who took the photograph? Where did it come from? How do we know this is of the scene? So typically you would bring in say the crime scene technician. Who’s the photographer and say, all right, what’s your name? Spell it for the court recorder. Uh Where do you work? How long have you worked there? What are your responsibilities? Uh And then what was your involvement in this case? On such and such a date? Were you called to the scene? What were your responsibilities there? You took photos? No kidding.
Um And you took a whole bunch of photos. Uh Some of those photos we plan to introduce, uh you know, have been admitted into evidence. We’d like to publish them to the jury. Uh But to establish foundation, I’m going to show you a photograph. The jury won’t see it.
I’m gonna show it to you, the witness, the photographer, the crime scene technician. You tell me if this is a photograph that you took at the crime scene and can testify about the veracity of this photograph, that’s the foundation being established, that’s connecting that photograph to the reality of the underlying crime. Once the photographer says, yes, I recognize taking that photo, it’s a fair and accurate representation of the scene. Then it can be published to the jury because you’ve established the necessary foundation and by published to the jury.
We mean now you can show it not just to the witness but to the actual jury. You can put the photograph up on the screen up on the TV. S, pass it around hand, hand to hand, whatever the case may be. But until you’ve established a foundation, even though that photograph has been admitted into evidence in the court, the jury still can’t see it, can’t see it yet. Once you have a witness, a human being on the stand who can establish the foundation for that photograph, connecting it somehow to the crime scene. Uh then because you need a witness, you can’t cross examine a photograph, right? So every piece of evidence has to be subject to cross examination impeachment.
So you need a human being to do that. That’s the role of the photographer in this context. All right. So that’s the difference between evidence being admitted and evidence being published to the jury. All right, let’s that out of the way. Let’s dive into my little summary here.
Uh Where is it? All right. The first thing of note and I didn’t even mention it today. It didn’t occur to me until after when I saw the, uh, uh, after I turned off the part two the afternoon, uh, live stream today, uh, my stream of the court was still running and they had a video from outside the courtroom and it was the defense lawyers and Alec Baldwin leaving the courtroom, exiting the courtroom on, you know, on foot. And, uh, along with Baldwin’s wife, hilarious, hilarious. Sorry. Hilaria Baldwin. And, um, she didn’t have her baby with her and I realized, oh my God, he killed the baby.
No, no, I’m just kidding. I don’t think he killed this baby. Uh, when I saw her come into the jury selection, walk into the courtroom with that baby in her arms that swaddled baby, I thought, oh, my gosh, this is, this is like a pure sympathy play. Who would think to bring a baby, an infant into a courtroom, into a trial proceeding. I can’t believe the judge is going to allow this. Well, either they didn’t try or the judge told them that’s not happening in my courtroom.
I’m not having a crying baby. You, you’ve seen the judge, right? Judge, uh, judge resting b face, Mary Marlowe summer. She takes no nonsense in her courtroom. So either they didn’t try to bring the baby in or, uh, she said no, we’re, we’re just not doing that and it could matter because the jury made up that was ultimately selected and seated and is listening to this trial is 11 women and five men. Well, that’s 16. Right? So, ultimately, there’s only 12 jurors who will deliberate. We don’t know yet who the alternates are.
They’re not going to be identified until uh after closing arguments before they go into deliberations, presumably by random lot. Uh, four will be selected as alternates and, and dismissed. So we end up at 12, but we don’t know what combination. So it could be. We end up with seven women and all five men almost balanced between the genders. It could be, we end up with 11 women and one dude and women are often more amenable to emotional based arguments. I know misogynist of me.
Um But in, in my life, my limited life experience, that’s generally true, not true of all women, generally true compared to men. Uh So I thought if that baby is in the courtroom every day and we end up with 11 women and one dude on the jury that might be enough right there having nothing to do with the, the legal merits of the case. Just having to do with the emotional quota because the jury doesn’t know the sentence Alex facing. They don’t know, it’s only 18 months for manslaughter. Uh, they probably imagine it’s much longer than that in most states, manslaughter with the gun would be 10 years for some reason. It’s only 18 months in New Mexico.
So they may be thinking, oh, we can’t send this guy to prison. We, we think he did something wrong but let, let them, let them be sued. We’re not gonna send them to prison.
It’s probably a decade. Right? Little baby. 10 years of the baby’s life won’t have a father. So, uh, but in any case, there was no baby. And those, that’s the math of the, uh, of the jury so far.
So the judge I just showed you is Mary Marlowe summer. I think she’s great. Very much in control of her courtroom.
I like strong judges in the courtroom. I think she makes very reasonable rulings. Uh, they’re not, I don’t wanna say they’re even handed in the sense that they go 5050 each side because that doesn’t make any sense. You, your, your ruling should be rationally legally based. That could mean they 100{ebf8267f808eac43d24742043db51eeeb004db6334271e1bb6fe8c21c7925753} go for one side and they’re still legally sound rulings. Um, but all the rulings I see her make are, are reasonable. I might not make the exact ones all the time, but they’re all reasonable decisions.
Good judge. Then we have the prosecutors, Kerri Morrissey, she was the prosecutor for the Hannah Guterres trial of as well. Uh, a career defense attorney who just was assigned as special prosecutor for this case and she seems to trip up sometimes on kind of the mental transition from the defense state of mind to the prosecutors state of mind. I’ve, I’ve noticed she sometimes has difficulty with that in the pretrial hearings. In this case.
She has not come across as superhero like as she did in the Hannah Guterres trial. Now in Hannah Guterres, she was up against a attorney defense attorney, Jason Bowles and he was terrible. So it’s easy to look like a champion when your opponent is terrible in the pretrial motion. She, she often seemed to get, let, let the defense here get under her skin, uh, in a way that I think is imprudent.
You shouldn’t let other people drive your emotions like that. I mean, she has good reason to be irritated by them. But you know, you just shouldn’t allow that to happen.
And uh but having said that I will say that today in court, she was, she was killer. She, she was actually slaughtered. Uh That was the Kerry Morrison.
I remember from the Hannah Guterres trial. And then we also have her Linda Johnson or Linda was just within the last couple of months uh appointed as a prosecutor on this case, career prosecutor. Very, these are both very smart women, very capable lawyers, very, very dangerous opponents. Then we have the defense crew. Uh Luke Nikas and Alex Spiro are both partners from Quinn Emanuel, a top 50 worldwide law firm, but they’re New York lawyers, they’re based out of Manhattan. They come across as such, uh, they’re partners at Quinn Emanuel. You don’t, you, you’re not a dummy and get that job.
These are very, very smart guys. Unfortunately, they don’t have much to work with, uh, Alec, their client, Alec Baldwin gave him bad facts to work with. Uh, the law is not in their favor. The legal cliche is when the facts are in your favor. Pound the facts when the law is in your favor. Pound the law when neither the facts nor the law are in your favor, pound the table. They’re having to do a lot of table pounding.
Now, I think if the facts or law were on their side, these guys would probably be killer, but they’re really struggling with what Alec Baldwin gave them to work with. Now, within that context, I think they’re doing mostly a fine job, but it’s really difficult. Um Today was all our Alex Burro. He did everything he did the opening and he did cross examination of every one of the state’s witnesses. Um Luke Nikas was at the council table but he, he didn’t contribute in that kind of way.
Uh Heather Leblanc was also at the council table, did not contribute in any particular way. She’s not uh with Quinn Emanuel, she’s the local New Mexico attorney. Um You, uh because Luke Nikas and a Burro out of New York, they’re representing Baldwin Pro Hak VCI, meaning they’ve with the permission of the court because they haven’t passed the bar. They haven’t been admitted to practice law in New Mexico, but this is done rather routinely. It’s not a big deal, but then you do need a local uh attorney to kind of represent the, the local guild of attorneys that, that appears to be Heather Leblanc’s job. Although in pretrial motion, she’s, she’s come across as a very capable lawyer too.
All right. So what are the charges here? Because the, the, the defense is doing a lot of like, pay no attention to these criminal charges behind the curtain. These are not the criminal charges you are looking for kind of stuff because the, the, the facts and law are really damaging for Alec Baldwin on the criminal charges, the actual elements, the material elements of these criminal charges. It’s just, it’s just an open and shut manslaughter case every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Um, but here are the charges from the indictment. Um, involuntary manslaughter, two counts. Well, one count, he can only be found guilty of one of them, but they’re in the alternative.
One of them is that he committed a misdemeanor an unlawful misdemeanor act that resulted in the death of a person. Uh That’s this involuntary manslaughter, negligent use of a firearm. Uh If the underlying criminal act were a felony, he’d be looking at felony murder if the felony resulted in the death. But that’s not what applies here. What, what applies here is the underlying crime alleged is a misdemeanor. The misdemeanor is negligent handling of a firearm. So they’re saying, uh, we believe he negligently ha handled that firearm violated.
That’s a separate statute under New Mexico law. Therefore, it’s an unlawful act. Uh, misdemeanor, he committed that misdemeanor, somebody died as a result, involuntary manslaughter. The second path to involuntary manslaughter doesn’t require that the state prove beyond a reasonable doubt that and handling of a firearm there. They only need to show that he was engaged in conduct that could result in death.
Um, and he did it without due care and circumspection and death resulted. This is the handling of some inherently dangerous instrument. You do it without adequate due care and circumspection. Someone dies, involuntary manslaughter, inherently dangerous instruments are explosives, uh heavy machinery, um, dangerous chemicals or firearms. So you’re handling a firearm and somebody dies in the course of your handling that firearm and you don’t have some legal justification or excuse justification like self defense, excuse, like it’s a genuine accident from a, a legal technical legal term of art perspective.
Um, then it’s just manslaughter and unfortunately, there is no accident argument here on the facts of this case because what the fact supports really unequivocally is that Alec Baldwin knew he had a real gun in his hand. He told detectives that he knew it was dangerous because it was a real gun. Uh, we know he pointed the gun directly at Helena Hutchins because the bullet struck her.
Uh, we know he cocked the hammer because even he says he cocked the hammer and really, we know he pulled the trigger. Uh, all the evidence in this case is that this gun could not have fired, had he not pulled the trigger functionally? It was perfect. Um, and the, the state’s gonna present a ton of evidence on how this gun functioned perfectly every time it was handled every time it was used from the point, it left the factory all the way up until the moment that Alec Baldwin used that gun to unintentionally but recklessly kill Helena Hutchins.
The only evidence that the gun ever, uh, did something weird. Uh just went off uh is Alec Baldwin’s self serving statement on the George Stephanopoulos show that he never touched the trigger. But when he was interviewed by police, he didn’t say he never touched the trigger. He said that the gun just went off and that and that’s it. Every everybody else, every other examination, every other test people completely disinterested from this, the gun worked just fine. So, uh with that, let’s dig into what do we have? Opening statement. Opening statement was by or Linda Johnson.
That’s the prosecutor here on the right. Very capable, low intensity, not a lot of histrionics, not a lot of emotion, uh, very methodical, organized professional. Uh Overall, I’d give her a grade of maybe seven or eight out of 10. It, it could have been better in spots but it was solid professional work.
Uh So she talked about how uh life threatening safety matters, life threatening safety issues matter on a movie set just like it does everyone else. Uh Basically, there’s, there’s no unique involuntary manslaughter law for a movie set. It’s one set of laws for everybody, especially when life is at stake.
And of course, we’re going to hear about the S A safety guidelines, which I talk about frequently refrain from pointing a firearm at anyone. Did Alec Baldwin do that? Obviously, the gun shot Helena Hutchins never place your finger on the trigger until you’re ready to shoot. Did Alec Baldwin do that? Well, there’s lots of evidence of him doing it in proximate time to the shooting.
There’s, there’s his finger right there moments earlier the same day when he’s practicing his presentation, every time it’s captured on film, his finger on the trigger when he presents that guy. So he did all that. He did all that. It’s really incontrovertible. Um, she mentioned to the jury that a lot of people will call this a prop gun but make make no mistake. This, everyone understood.
This was a real gun capable of firing real bullets. Everybody knew that no one believed this was some inert object that was incapable of firing a lethal round. Um She spoke to the fact that there’s zero evidence to believe the gun wasn’t working in any way other than designed, including a chain of custody all the way from the factory and they’re gonna bring in the owner of the factory petta himself uh to testify about this.
Uh There’s video of Baldwin shooting the pistol over a variety of days on set. Uh We have the FBI functionality testing. We even have Baldwin making statements that the gun was working. Just the only problem with the gun was that it had a live round in it. Otherwise the gun was perfect. Baldwin says that now not notably, one point in this chain of custody is the importer. So Pieta in Italy uses an importer to bring the gun into the US.
It’s very common for overseas gun manufacturers. The importer actually used this gun as a show gun. So there’s large gun industry events, there’s like the nr a annual meeting. Uh there’s shot show. Um And these are, I don’t, I don’t know, remember I’ve been to both of these many times, but it’s like 20 acres of exhibit space. It’s, it’s something insane.
Uh You, you literally spend days walking the exhibit space. That’s how large it is. Um And uh the importer uh anyone who puts a gun out for display at one of these events. Uh First of all, all the guns are deactivated so they can’t fire for safety purposes. So firing pins are taken out, strikers are taken out whatever is necessary.
So the gun can’t fire a real round. The reason is the gun is going to be handled by maybe thousands of people at this event because they’re on display. You can just pick it up, you can cock the hammer, you can press the trigger, you can spin the cylinder, you can, you can do all that stuff. And if this was a show, Gunn, that means it very likely was handled by hundreds or thousands of people. And there’s zero record of any of them saying, hey, you know, something’s wrong with this guy.
Yeah, the the hammer just dropped. Is it supposed to do that? The hammer just drops by itself? So, and then of course the other points of the chain of custody that there was never any evidence that it didn’t work when the FBI got it after the shooting, they did function. Testing.
Um, quarter cock couldn’t drop the hammer without working the trigger. Half cock couldn’t drop the hammer without working the trigger. And if you had dropped it from half cock, if you had managed to drop it from quarter cock, the hammer wouldn’t have enough force to, to ignite the primer because it’s, it’s barely off the primer if you could have dropped it from half cock, um, half cock is also the loading position, the cylinder spins, but when you’re cocking it, the, the cylinder spins enough.
So even if the hammer fell, it would fall between chambers and not strike a primer. So that can’t be what happened. Uh You have it at full cock and no one could get the hammer to drop without working the trigger until of course they hit the hammer with a mallet and managed to break the gun. Uh But that’s just obviously, you know, nobody’s saying someone hit the gun with a mallet when it was in Alec Baldwin’s hand pointed at Helena Hutchins. So the implication obviously is that he had to have pulled the trigger in order for the gun to discharge. Uh Johnson, Prosecutor Johnson, I spoke quite a bit about Baldwin acting generally unsafe with what he knew to be a real guy and he would use it as a pointer.
Go over there go over here. He was constantly sweeping and pointing into people. They, they have lots of video of that.
We saw a bunch of that in the Hanukah terrorist trial. We’ll see it again here. Um We’ll see many images of him with his finger on the trigger when it’s not supposed to be like right here, the one I already shared with you. Um Now there was one error here. Uh So the state made the claim that uh in the scene where Baldwin’s presenting the gun that he, he was instructed to, he was only supposed to slowly draw the gun from the holster and then like hold it against his body at an angle.
He wasn’t supposed to point it. He wasn’t supposed to cock the hammer, he wasn’t supposed to pull the trigger. None of that was in the script and none of that is in the script, but we did see video later in the day uh where they’re, they’re filming this, this practice scene right here that I, I got the screen capture of um where the director, someone, there’s a voice in the moment uh telling him, whip it out, whip it out, do it again.
So that was a mistake on the prosecution to you don’t wanna be making what are later be easily exposed as false representations to the jury, right? If you lose credibility, why should the jury believe anything you have to say any of your legal argument? I I don’t know if that was just an oversight by the state. It’s hard to believe they’ve had long enough to look at all this evidence. Um, but in fairness to Baldwin, now that doesn’t excuse the manslaughter, you don’t get to commit manslaughter because someone’s advocating you do something reckless that’s on you. Uh, but it was a misstep, I thought by, or Linda Johnson, the prosecutor, she did bring up the Hagues Lucian Haig and Michael Haigh Lucian Haig was the uh one of the state gun experts in the Hannah Guterres trial. Michael Haig is his son. They’ll, they’ll apparently both be testifying in this trial at one point.
They looked at internal parts of the gun after it came back from the FBI and parts were broken, uh with a microscope and saw some odd serrations on some metal parts in the gun. They didn’t know where those came from. And I thought, you know, we should mention this to the state because, you know, the defense might get their own expert. Who’s gonna say, well, look at these serrations, why didn’t the state expert point this out? So they pointed it out to the state and they’re like, well, we, we don’t know how those got there. We don’t know, seems unlikely that the, this is a result of the, the, like the breakage of the other parts we know was from the mallet from the FBI, right? So they did that report for the prosecutor’s office. Now, that was like a year ago, just a few weeks ago, um, Lucian Haig had an opportunity to speak with the FBI firearms examiner who hit the gun with the mallet. And he learned for the first time that one way to hit a gun with a mallet is to have the mallet in a fixture like a mechanical device.
So you raise it up and you let it go and it pivots down in the mechanical device. So it strikes with the same energy, same angle every time it’s, you can replicate the function that way. And if it’s hitting perfectly straight on to the hammer, you shouldn’t have gotten these weird diagonal serrations is what Michael Haig had been. Uh Lucian Haig had been thinking about when he alerted the the state to these weird serrations. When he spoke to the FBI examiner, he realized the FBI examiner didn’t use any kind of fixture. He just had a mallet in his hand and was just whacking away at the gun, excuse me.
So the force was not measured or recorded in any way, it was not consistent, it was not, the angle was not specific and that kind of, I’ll call it sloppy, uncontrolled, poorly controlled uh striking with the mallet could well have caused those serrations. Um The defense wants to look at these serrations and say, look the gun was modified. The state has an explanation for how those rations could have happened but more importantly, in any case, those serrations necessarily existed at the time the FBI did the functionality testing. I mean, there, there they would have had to come from the factory because there’s no evidence, there was any other alteration to the gun at any point in the chain of custody. And if they were present from the factory, which I expect petta is going to deny talk about their quality control measures. But if it was present from the factory, well, then obviously, whatever those rations were, they didn’t affect the safety or functionality of the gun because it was perfectly safe and functioning perfectly the entire time. So really, that’s, uh, those markings are a red herring from the defense, but the defense doesn’t have much to work with and they’ve been harping on those quite a bit.
So I expect them to make a big point of that in the, uh, in the defense here. The bottom line Baldwin pointed what he knew to be a real gun at another human being cocked, the hammer pulled the trigger all constitutes reckless, disregard for Hutchins safety or Linda Johnson told the jury, uh, and the only proper verdict, the only true justice here requires a guilty verdict of involuntary manslaughter. The defense opening was by Alex, bro. Alex Biro is in the middle here.
He did everything today for the defense. I did cross and all the witnesses did the opening statement and it was I gotta say a pretty weak opening statement. Um, mostly they tried to, uh, you know, move the ball, these, these are not the facts you’re looking for to the jury. Uh, try to change the legal argument from what the, what the indictment actually calls for to something else because what the indictment actually calls for is easily provable here by the state. So that’s not good for the defense. So he largely, he keeps trying to change the subject.
He was quite emotional. I thought he was somewhat disorganized, which really, there’s no excuse for that. They, they’ve had, you know, months years to prepare for this. He just wanted to talk anything other than the material facts of the case. Uh, the elements of the crime. Uh, sure, this was somebody’s fault but whoever’s fault it was, it was everybody but their client, um, talked a lot about how movies are, make believe and the rules should be different for a movie set even though they’re not right. Involuntary manslaughter.
You know, the statute doesn’t say unless you’re on a movie set, unless you’re an actor. There’s no exceptions in the law for being on a movie set. But he said there should be, uh, and he told a lot of half truths, uh, which I guess some could characterize as lies. Uh, and overall, I would give him a grade of maybe a 4 to 5 out of 10.
It just was not good. Again, he’s limited. I don’t mean to criticize him as an attorney. He’s really limited by what his client gave him.
So he characterized this as a tragedy but not a crime actors play characters that can do lethal things. We all see movies, people shoot at each other. Um because these things are not actually lethal on a movie set, the cardinal rules of gun safety. He said don’t apply on a movie set.
That’s a little awkward because, well, they do. I mean, the movie industry says they do. Uh, so that was, I think an argument that’s gonna come back to haunt him. Uh, he, and then he wanted to, you know, change the, uh, the focus of the jury to things that don’t matter.
He said the first critical issue is not Baldwin’s recklessness, but how did a real bullet make it onto the movie set? Obviously, Baldwin had nothing to do with the bullet getting to the movie set, right? So if you can convince the jury that’s the issue. Well, then Baldwin’s in the clear, no one’s arguing. He had anything to do with that. Then he told one of his many half truths, he said, and you can’t distinguish a real bullet from a dummy just by looking at it.
Well, that’s sometimes true, right? Because we have dummies that have BB in them that you have to shake, to know they’re dummies, they externally look just like a real bullet until you shake it. So you can’t tell the difference between those two just by looking at them. That’s why there’s another means to tell. Um Then they have the dummies with the hole drilled in the side. Obviously, those are visually different or, or the dummies with the primer removed, those are visually diff different.
Um So when he phrases it so carefully, you can’t distinguish real bullets from dummies simply by looking at them. It’s really, it’s obviously disingenuous and just like with the state, when I mentioned, if the, if the jury concludes, you’re just bald face, lying to them, why should they believe anything? You say any argument you make any evidence you offer? Uh He said there should never have been a real bullet on the movie set. True enough. Um And that makes, he says real bullets on the set being unforeseeable, completely unpredictable. And therefore the notion that Baldwin’s gun, even though he knew it to be a real gun, even if you believe he cocked the hammer, even if you believe he pulled the trigger, the death of Helena Hutchins was completely unforeseeable. No one imagined that there could be a real bullet in the gun except again, they run into the problem with these S A safety guidelines.
If, if that was really true, if everybody in the industry believed it was impossible for a real bullet to be in the gun. Why do we have these rules? Why does s a have a rule saying never point a firearm at anyone never place your finger on the trigger until you’re ready to shoot. Why? Because these guns are dangerous and can kill people. That’s why. So again, a weak argument. Uh, so not only did he want to focus on how the bullet got on set, but then he wanted to focus on how the round got into the gun because of course, nobody claims that Baldwin loaded the gun.
So it’s the armor’s fault for putting the bullet in there. Fair enough. Um She got convicted and is serving time right now for involuntary manslaughter. It was the first assistant director who was overall supervision for safety on the set. David halls his fault for not spotting the live round on the gun.
Fair enough. He took a plea deal. Uh So he’s convicted of a crime for his errors, seems genuinely remorseful, by the way, David Halls. Uh But they seem to be implying that if other people were at fault, then Alec Baldwin can’t be at fault. And of course, that’s not the case. Everyone’s at fault for what they did.
Hannah Guterres is at fault for allowing live ammo on the set. David Halls is at fault for not catching the live round in the gun before he called it a cold gun. And Alec Baldwin’s at fault for pointing what he knew a real gun to be at directly at a woman cocking the hammer, pressing the trigger and shooting her dead. Uh Alex Burro talked about, all Baldwin knows is that the gun placed in his hand had been declared safe. Baldwin’s mind is on the role of the character. He’s 100 years in the past in his mind. In for this western, he’s worrying about acting, not about gun safety.
And again, that sounds good. Until again, you look at the sad guidelines because they don’t say as an actor, you have no responsibility for safety. They say the opposite of that as an actor, you are ultimately responsible for your own safety and the safety of your fellow cast members. Safety is everyone’s responsibility. It doesn’t go away for the actor and all these sad guidelines, the state has a witness who’s gonna testify at length, who helps draft these safety guidelines for the industry. Let’s go and testify about all of this extensively.
Uh Again, he does this kind of deflection, you know, don’t, don’t look at, don’t look at the material facts and elements of the crime, look at other stuff. Everybody in the movie set has a role. Armor does armor work. Director directs the actor acts, he’s not responsible for safety except the screen.
Actors guild disagrees. The actor still has responsibility for safety. Uh Nobody imagined there could be a real bullet in the gun.
Uh Then, then he really missteps. He says, hey, when 911 was called, they love the defense, loved this. Uh the people who called 911 said, hey, we’ve had an accidental mo shooting on a movie set.
Some of these people didn’t even see the shooting. They don’t really know if it’s a accident they’re using accident in the colloquial sense, not in the legal sense. Um, accidents is a legal term of art, meaning there’s no legal liability. If it’s a genuine accident, this is not a genuine accident, a genuine accident in this scenario would have been if the, the a part of the set collapsed onto Alec Baldwin and that’s what made the gun discharge. Um So then he would have no culpability. He had played no role, no affirmative role.
He didn’t decide to discharge the gun, he didn’t decide to engage in unsafe conduct. The set fell on him, that’s a genuine accident. That that would be an excusable homicide, still a homicide but an excusable homicide with no legal liability, not even civil liability, but that’s not what happened here. Alec Baldwin made took deliberate specific actions. He deliberately pointed the gun at Helena Hutchins. He deliberately cocked the hammer, he deliberately pulled the trigger that makes this not an accident that makes this reckless conduct for which manslaughter is the appropriate charge and crime.
Uh Then he said this wasn’t even treated as a crime at the time. They just kept, everyone just kept calling it an accident. No one was thinking of this as a crime scene. This was a bad misstep. Both both his emphasis on accident and his, uh, misdirection that this, you know, everyone thought of it as an accident, not a crime scene really came to hurt him later. Uh, of course, he said the police make made mistakes. They had never investigated the shooting on a movie set before.
That’s both to undermine the, uh, the perceived, uh, credibility authority of the investigation. Defense attorneys always do this. Uh, you know, the investigation was inherently incompetent. Therefore, you shouldn’t trust anything that comes out of it. Uh, that’s in almost every criminal defense. But also, uh, look how unusual this was.
These police career, law enforcement had never before encountered a shooting on a movie set. That show. It’s so rare that makes it unforeseeable and it needs to be foreseeable right now.
Of course, it’s important to keep in mind. Foreseeability doesn’t mean certainty. It means while foreseeable, this could happen.
For example, a very common form of reckless involuntary manslaughter is a drunk driving homicide, vehicular homicide. So if someone gets drunk at a bar, they get behind the wheel to drive home, they’re not, they don’t want to hurt anybody. That was, that’s the last thing in the world they want, they just want to get home, but they know when they’re driving drunk, they’re creating an unjustified risk of death to others. And if they happen to run granny over in the crosswalk on the way home, uh, that’s involuntary manslaughter every day of the week and twice on Sundays. Now, the fact that it was three o’clock in the morning and it was highly unlikely that granny would be in the crosswalk at three o’clock in the morning does not make it not involuntary manslaughter. It can be an unlikely event.
I would expect that the people who drive drunk very rarely actually kill someone. But the consequence when they do it is so severe, the death of a human being. It’s, it’s a foreseeable consequence of drug driving. You can foresee that this will happen. It’s not completely unpredictable. That’s what foreseeable, foreseeability means in this context. Um So he wants to focus on everything else other than what Alec did on the bullet.
Um This is, yeah, the, the prosecution doesn’t want to focus on what matters. What matters is the bullet. Where did it come from? How to get in the gun? They wanna focus. They have a bright shiny object. They’re fascinated with poor Alec Baldwin. Uh He talked of course about how they sent the, the gun for testing that they knew would destroy the gun, destroy the gun, the gun was destroyed.
This will come back to hurt him too, I believe. Um Of course, the gun was broken by the FBI, but two very tiny parts were broken and they were, they were sent back. Of course, with the gun, the gun is, is visible to the jury.
They saw it today. So the cylinder is out of it and there’s a little plastic container with the broken parts in it. But the, the whole guns there, obviously the gun, it wasn’t destroyed, it wasn’t eradicated, it wasn’t vaporized and, and it was not inevitable that this would break the gun. This was not an expected outcome. They, they knew it was possible that this testing with the mallet could damage the gun, but it wasn’t in inevitable. They didn’t know it was going to happen. Uh He argued that unless Alec knew the bullet was in the gun, it can’t be a homicide case.
And he really misled the jury on what homicide means. He’s trying to make him think. Well, then it can’t be a murder case, but there’s many forms of homicide, right? There’s an, an intentional unlawful killing would be a murder form of homicide and a, an intentional lawful killing, like in self defense would be a lawful homicide, wouldn’t be a crime at all.
They’re both homicides, but one of them is murder, life in prison without per without possibility of early release. And the other one is not a crime at all, even though they’re both homicides and in the middle, there’s a reckless homicide where you did not have an intent to kill someone, but you intentionally acted in a reckless manner that resulted in death. They’re all homicides. So this was a homicide.
All homicide means literally is one person killed, another person that could be justified like self defense, it could be excusable like an accident. It could be intentional like a murder. It could be reckless, like involuntary manslaughter. They’re all homicides. So that kind of wrapped up the, uh, the opening by Alex Spiro again. I’d give him a, a 4 to 5, I think out of 10.
It just, and that’s including a, a margin of error for the fact that he has bad law and facts to work with. He, he just, it wasn’t that good. Sorry. Um, even though I’m sure he’s absolutely a world class attorney, I, you don’t get the job he has without being super sharp, super cap worth keeping in mind.
By the way, I mentioned that Carrie Morrissey as a career defense attorney and just got picked to be a special prosecutor here and seems to have trouble with the transition from a defense mindset to a prosecutor mindset. Uh, these counsel for the, for the, uh, defense here, these guys on the left, uh, they’re both civil litigators. Uh, I think one of them, I think Luke Nikas might have been a prosecutor sometime in the past but their, their big time career, the one that makes them all the money now, uh, for Quinn Emanuel, like what their partners for is civil litigation. And I see them making missteps between transitioning from the mental state for civil litigation to criminal law. Uh, it’s not the same, the legal doctrines are not the same, the legal arguments are not the same so that could be a cause of some missteps there. Yeah.
OK. I’m gonna pick up the pace a little bit actually, before I do, let me see if there’s any uh comments I should address already. Look at the law of self defense memberships.
If you want comments uh addressed in youtube, they need to be $10 minimum super chats or in Rumble. I’ll take a look at rumble for uh rumble rants. Let’s see. Am I streaming on Rumble? You know, I just get, oh, there I am streaming. OK.
Let me fix this too on X pin to profile. There we go. All right, people talking about how Texas is big. Uh Larry Foreman du I guy is supposed to be in the courtroom. I didn’t see him today but the, the camera angle, if he’s sitting behind the uh the prosecution, I don’t think we see him on camera given the way the camera angle is unless they change the camera angle. Uh What if S A what if the S A rules did allow for recklessness? Would that get Alec in the clear? And the answer is no because New Mexico law, Trumps S A guidelines.
Uh Jason says the gun may not have been destroyed, but it definitely was put in a state where the defense would not be able to demonstrate any potential misfire malfunction whereby creating a situation that now requires the jury to trust the prosecution that nothing nefarious was said, no, the, the jury doesn’t have to do that. Uh The defense is going to talk about the fact that the state broke the gun and made it impossible for us to test and then the jury decides how much weight to give that. Uh, it would have been helpful if there had been other reports of the gun working in a weird way consistent with the malfunction when the only evidence of a malfunction, evidence of a malfunction is that well, they broke the gun and we couldn’t test it for one. Is that not speculative when the gun’s been handled by tons of other people and it’s never malfunctioned before. Um But the, the defense is definitely gonna be able to talk about it. You have to keep in mind lots of testing destroys the sample, right? If, if there’s a, if there’s a blood smear and you take a swab of the blood and you test the swab, the sample gets destroyed, you know.
So what you tested is cannot be retested. That’s very, that’s not uncommon in, in forensic science. All right. So first witness was uh Nicholas Lafleur.
He was the first law enforcement officer on the scene very young. I think he’d only been uh a cop for two years or so when he got there. And frankly, his performance reflects that now on the witness stand, he was incredibly low energy, like on a scale of 1 to 10. He was about at one half of energy.
Um but a useful witness for the state. Uh He did talk quite a bit about how they put up crimes, crime scene tape, um did crime scene stuff. So the defense wanted the jury in their opening statement, the defense wanted the jury to believe that everyone was just treating this like an accident. No one was imagining this was a crime.
The police sure were they put crime scene tape up. They separated witnesses. They didn’t do a good job of separating witnesses, but they did. Uh they collected evidence. Uh They were certainly treating it as a crime scene. Uh There was body worn, camera footage from the floor.
Uh Some of it showed Hutchins on the, on the floor of the church. Um You know, dying basically uh shot traverse through the chest spine, broken by the bullet and souza crying, crying. Uh I don’t mean to disparage him.
He’d been shot in the shoulder with the same bullet. He was in terrible pain. So crying out in pain is how I should put it. Um There were also lots of witnesses talking with Baldwin, they were talking with him, he was talking with them, lots of people on their cell phones who are they communicating with? None of this should have been allowed by the police, none of it because people contaminate each other’s testimony if not maliciously just we begin to form our memories especially in the immediate aftermath when the fem memories are still in short term memory before they go into long term memory. They’re very subject to uh manipulation, even innocent manipulation. Uh So you shouldn’t have witnesses talking to each other. You shouldn’t have them on their phones.
All the phones should have been taken. None of that was done. Partly, I think it was uh the youthfulness and inexperience of this cop, but partly there were 100 200 people around and it was a handful of officers. Uh So there were limits to what they could do. I think they still could have done a better job.
But regardless, um let’s see, that’s mostly what he talked about. Just his observations on the scene. The treating it like a crime scene was the important take home from the direct questioning by the by the state. And that was done by Carrie Morrissey, the direct questioning of Nicholas Lafleur, it was pretty undramatic. The drama comes later then on cross examination, um La Flora had made some statements previously where he said, uh Baldwin seemed shocked, he seemed like an actor out of character.
Uh So these were quoted back to him. Uh He had said, well, it didn’t seem like he had intent. Even lafleur couldn’t really remember what he meant by intent, but he said that phrase. So that was read back to him. Baldwin was detained by officers.
He wasn’t free to leave. But the defense made clear and the defense here, the cross examination was again by Alex Spiro, but he wasn’t under arrest. Right.
Well, detention and arrest are two different things. Detention is, you know, you stay here. We want to talk to you to determine whether or not this probable cause of crime has been committed. Arrest is what happens after law enforcement is determined that there’s probable cause that a crime has been committed. There are two different things. In fact, Alec Baldwin’s never been arrested.
Uh There was never any need to arrest him. Everybody knows who he is. They know where to find him. What’s he gonna do? Flee the country? Uh He was asked on cross, didn’t you make mistakes? Didn’t you still let witnesses talk to each other? Couldn’t you have done things better? And the officer said, yeah, basically I made all kinds of mistakes. Then the defense really dug itself a hole because they pulled out the C AD report. The C AD report is like a transcript of the 911 calls everything that goes across like the computer or the radio communications for the officer.
And uh the defense holds up the C AD report and says, uh look at this. Does it, does it say accident here? Yeah, accident here. Yeah, accident here.
Yeah. A it says accident all over this document, doesn’t it? And, and lafleur says, yeah, there’s a lot of references to accident there which of course the defense is trying to say to the jury, hey, this wasn’t a crime, this was just an accident. Worst case, this should be in civil court. Not here. Well, then Kerrie Morrissey comes up for redirect and she slaughters, she slaughters. First of all, she touches on the question of intent because the defense put so much weight on it that, that lafleur said, well, he didn’t seem to have intent, is intent required for involuntary manslaughter. Is it required you intended to hurt somebody or kill somebody? No, it’s not a crime of intent of the outcome.
All that matters is, did you act recklessly? There’s no intent of outcome required. So that’s irrelevant. Then she digs into the C AD report and it turns out this C AD report, it’s like an amalgamation of radio calls and computer calls for everything that happened like that day. So there’s, there’s vehicular accidents, there’s all kinds of stuff happening that have nothing to do with Helena Hutchins.
So every one of these references to accident and she goes through, there’s like 20 of them. There’s like over 10 pages of this C AD report and, and Carrie Morrissey just goes through each one, this one, there’s an accident here, doesn’t it lafleur says, yeah, it does. Does it have anything to do with Helena Hutchins? No, the next one accident. Yeah. Anything to do with Helena Hutchins.
No, next one accident. Yeah, anything to do with Helena. She does like 20 of these just, I, I mean, by, by 10 you’re like, oh my God, Carrie, stop you. You’re just, he’s dead already. He’s dead.
Not the witness, the witness was fine but poor Alex Burro. Um And she asked him, are, or is there even one reference to accident in this entire report that has anything to do with Helena Hutchins? No, nothing. So now the defense has been called caught, basically outright lying to the jury.
And again, that’s bad because if the jury believes that you’re lying to them, why should they believe any argument you make or any evidence you present? You’re acting in bad faith. That’s bad for your client. All right. So that was it for Officer Lafleur low energy lafleur and Trump would call him, I suppose. Uh Let me take a look at the uh, comments again just to make sure there’s nothing new after that witness. Ok. So that looks good.
Let me take a look at Super Chats. Whoops, wrong button. Nothing new there.
I don’t really know how to do. It. Doesn’t look like there’s any rumble rants either.
Ok. So back back to it. If you want comments and questions addressed folks, they need to either be in the law, self-defense member chat or as a $10 Super Chat or uh I guess a rumble rant. If I can find a rumble rant, by the way, before I proceed, I should mention this Sunday this Sunday.
We are doing a very special, uh, end of week trial recap event. Uh with my good buddy, he’ll be joining us for a bit anyway, Adam Baldwin, not Alec Baldwin. Adam Baldwin. Uh, most of you, I hope know from shows like Firefly serenity, full metal Jacket, uh, the Patriots, uh Independence Day, uh wider Chuck the last ship.
Much, much more. We’re doing this on Sunday, but this will not be streamed on youtube or X or Rumble or even to our law self defense membership because we set this up as a webinar. It’s 100{ebf8267f808eac43d24742043db51eeeb004db6334271e1bb6fe8c21c7925753} free. Anyone can join us and we want you to join us. Um But you do have to register because it is a webinar and our webinar platform importantly, only allows for 500 people.
So there’s 500 seats first come first served. You can grab yours at Law of self defense.com/trial recap, trial, recap. Law of self defense.com/trial recap or scan that QR code there in the screen with your phone.
And that’ll bring you over to this page where you just hit that big blue button to grab your seat, only 500 seats, folks. Uh So we’ll do a recap. We’ll have little clips of what happened over the course of the week, my assessment of the various um you know, testimony arguments. Um And of course our, our forward looking view of what we think will happen in the, in the last five days of this trial.
Uh and Adam will be on, he’s great fun. He’s very entertaining. Lots of experience in Hollywood in, in movies and TV, shows handling guns. Of course. So he’s a lot of, uh professional experience and insight into how these things should be done. I think we’ll learn a lot from him.
He’s not a particular fan of Alec Baldwin there. He’s, he’s not one of the Baldwin brothers. He tells me they are distantly related like 10 generations ago back in Ireland. Uh but not, not a family member in any meaningful way. So join us for that, the Baldwin trial. Oh, we’re, we’re gonna be giving away folks over $10,000 worth of stuff.
A ton of our educational content. Uh Our platinum memberships, platinum law, self defense, platinum memberships are how you get my legal consult on your case. It’s the only way to get it. We only do legal consults for platinum members and they get it for free and you can win a platinum membership for free. Uh And if you’re already a platinum member and you win one of those, you can give them to somebody else that’s fine with us. You can designate a beneficiary essentially uh to, to collect your prize and we have some surprise gifts uh that I think a lot of you will appreciate. Uh at least one of them is, is the version of what I carry every day.
And that’s all I’ll say about that. But you do need to be present to win. So, law of self defense.com/trial recap, it’s gonna be a, a great deal of fun. I’ll leave that up on the screen as I go through the next witness. Uh So the next witness was sergeant, uh Tomao.
I’m not sure how to pronounce his first name. Tomao Benavidez. Ben Vides retired now but at the time he was a sergeant with the Santa Fe sheriff’s office. Uh He was um I guess you’d say he was in the commander ro ro commander role on scene when he got there.
Uh So lafleur would be reporting to Benavidez and uh the direct was by Linda Johnson. She did a fine job, very uh methodical. Uh He didn’t have that much to say except that he definitely treated everything as a crime scene, which is something the defense was trying to suggest otherwise they were trying to suggest.
Well, this was just an accident. No one thought this was a crime. Well, again, they put up crime scene tape, they collected evidence. Uh they secured guns, ammo. Uh chain of custody was established and maintained. Uh crime scene.
Technicians were put to work. They were certainly treating it as a crime scene. Now, on cross examination by Alex Spiro, he said, isn’t it true? The prop cart was a mess. You walked away from guns on the prop cart to go collect the baldwin gun.
Isn’t that because you think guns on a set are inherently safe when you picked up the Baldwin gun, I noticed on your body worn camera you didn’t touch the trigger. Isn’t that because you didn’t, you wanted to preserve the trigger for DNA testing and be Ben Aide said no, basically, I thought it was pretty funny. He said, uh, no, I just, I just didn’t want the gun to go off.
That’s why I wasn’t touching the trigger. Awkward moment. Uh, he asked Benavidez if you can tell dummies from live rounds just by looking at them. I co I covered this earlier. That’s like a half truth, which I would call a lie. Um, uh, yes.
Didn’t law enforcement want to find the origin of the bullet, didn’t that matter to you? And of course, Ben said, yeah, sure. We’d, we’d like to know where the bullet came from. Again. The defense is trying to make that the question for the jury to focus on as opposed to their client’s own reckless conduct. Um, they talked about how they put, uh, law enforcement, put Hannah Guterres in the back seat of a patrol car but didn’t do that with Baldwin, uh, to imply that, well, Hannah was obviously guilty had culpability, but Baldwin obviously didn’t you treated him differently? And then on redirect, uh, Linda Johnson again, uh, she asked, well, why wasn’t Baldwin put in a patrol car? And it wasn’t for any lack of culpability. It was because they didn’t have another car convenient, basically. Uh And they had very few officers to watch a large number of people.
So they had begun kind of grouping people so one officer could watch a whole bunch of people and Baldwin was in one of those groups. So an innocent explanation. Um not requiring a perceived absence of culpability or why Baldwin is not put in a patrol car. Then we had a very quick third witness, uh deputy Lou Han Luhan. Uh, also the San Francisco Sheriff’s office. The only reason he testified was he’s the guy who went to the hospital and got the bullet that the doctors took out of Joel Souza’s shoulder and put it into evidence. So that’s the only, he was only up there for minutes.
Uh, Alex Spiro did ask on cross examination. Well, you saw Souza in the hospital. Yep.
Uh, isn’t it true? He never mentioned Baldwin’s name. I’m not sure why that would be relevant to any of the material facts in the case, right? The manslaughter charge. Why would that be relevant? That doesn’t make any sense to me but, and, and the state objected, but the judge judge allowed it. She’s been pretty liberal, but with what she allows not, not a hard hammer, uh, she’ll stop abuse, but otherwise she’s, she’s giving these guys rope to run with, which is what she should be doing. Then we had the fourth witness of the day.
I should say half witness because we only got through direct of her. Uh, she wasn’t cross examined today. That’ll start tomorrow morning.
This was Marissa Popple, the crime scene technician, really the photographer. Uh, so she collected evidence. She did bring some evidence from the, from the scene to the sheriff’s office, but mostly she was a photographer. She did send some evidence out to be tested elsewhere.
She sent the gun to the FBI for DNA testing and of course, Alec Baldwin’s DNA was found on the gun as you would expect and for function testing. And of course, the gun operated perfectly until, until the FBI broke it when they later did this uh discharge testing, accidental discharge testing. And they unintentionally broke the Sear and the hammer like whacking it with a mallet. Uh They sent the AMMO box that um Hannah Guterres was using to load the gun. They sent the ammo box to the FBI for fingerprinting. Um She participated in the search at PDQ. Uh there was live ammo found at PDQ.
And of course, one of the defense theories in Hannah Guterres was that it was not Hannah who brought live ammo on the set, but that Seth Kenney provided it, but they sent the ammo found, they had found, remember they found one live round intact, live round on the movie set and then they had a, a handful of rounds they found at Seth Kennedy’s that were live ammo. They sent all of them to the FBI the FBI disassembled them and the gunpowder from the movie set live round was obviously different even to the naked eye than the gunpowder from Seth Kenney. So the source of the live round on the movie set was apparently not Seth Kenney. Or at least that connection could not be made on the evidence that was found. Uh This is where they show the gun, the, the gun as it came back from the FBI broken to the jury, the cylinders out, the broken parts are in a little plastic case. The, the gun’s obviously not destroyed. I mean, the guns 99{ebf8267f808eac43d24742043db51eeeb004db6334271e1bb6fe8c21c7925753} there.
Um So it wasn’t vaporized. It’s, it’s still together, it’s just has broken parts. Uh They talked about uh on direct exam on direct examination here was by Kerry Morrissey, by the way. Um So Kerry Morsey and Orlin Johnson have been going back and forth pretty regularly.
Uh The defense, not so much Alex Spiro did everything today, but this was by Kerry Morrisey. They talked about the different kinds of dummy rounds. Some have a hole in the side, some have B BS in them, some have a primer removed.
And the fact that no round can have all three of these. So if you have the hole in the side, the B BS tend to fall out of the and out of it, right? So you wouldn’t do, there’s no need to do both. Um If there’s holes, then you have a visual confirmation. It’s a dummy. You don’t need an audible confirmation.
If there’s no holes, you need an audible confirmation. So you would do one or the other or you could remove the primer and again, have a visual confirmation and they did have one fired case with a dimpled primer uh presumably and no bullet on it. So presumably, this was the fired case of of the round that fired the bullet that killed Elena Hutchins. And that pretty much wrapped up uh direct questioning of Marisa Poppel. So I expect we’ll start to tomorrow tomorrow morning um with cross examination of Marissa Pole and that’s about it, I think for today. So I will look at questions and comments again in a moment. Um I plan to, I think I will start live streaming at 830 tomorrow, maybe at eight.
If I get to my desk early, I haven’t decided yet, but no later than 830 trial proper. Uh should start the jury. This judge is timely. Uh I expect the jury to be seated by 9 a.m. and the cross examination of Marisa Popple.
I’m planning tomorrow to do what I did today. So I’ll do a morning show live stream. Uh and then I’ll end that, eat lunch and then I’ll, I’ll have scheduled a second afternoon live live stream. And then after that, after the court recesses for the day, we’ll have another day, one live summary like, like we’re doing right now, except of course for day two. Uh, let’s see.
Let’s take a look at the comments first from the law of self defense members. Yeah, I’m tired. Long day. Akua raises a good point. So, uh, one of the reasons the judge may be Zaku law, self defense member, uh, in the member chat, uh, he says, I wonder if the judge is giving so much leeway because she’s already said this trial isn’t getting any more days. So if you run out, you run out.
I think that’s part of it. The judges said this trial ends next Friday the 19th. That’s it. Um, I’m not wasting any more time on this.
Now. Most murder trials are like two days, folks, 1 to 3 days a murder trial where people are at risk of going to prison for life without possibility of early release. This is a manslaughter trial with an 18 month maximum.
So the judge is like, why, why do we even need eight days for a manslaughter trial? This is crazy and the, the defense saw she was getting frustrated. So, Alex Spiro of all people jumps up and says your honor. It’s not our fault. Everything is taking so long, even though it is, the defense has been dragging this out relentlessly, uh, your honor. It’s not the defense fault. This is taking so long. We could do our part in two days.
And the judge said, no kidding. All right, you get two days out of the eight, you get two. I’m giving the, the state six.
Uh, and she said, well, she waffled a little bit. She said, listen, maybe I’ll give you three if everyone behaves. So the state would only have five, but then it’s 5 to 3 still.
And I think, and both sides, uh, in as a strategic move, they would not inform the other side about exactly who their witnesses will be. Now, they do have to disclose witnesses in a witness list. But one trick you can use is if you know, you’re only gonna call 10 witnesses, you list 40.
So the other side has to prepare for 40 never really knows when, which ones you’re gonna end up picking so you can keep them off balance. That’s what was happening here. And ultimately, the judge basically said, um listen, this is how many days you get use them as you think best, you know, you wanna, you wanna spend all three days with one witness, you do that, but then you’re out of time, that’s it. So manage your time responsibly. So I, I think there’s a lot of truth to that.
Paul says Andrew, you’re making up for being off for a week or so. Yeah, I was, I was away for the July 4th week. It’s true.
It’s really hard when I travel by uh by motorcycle, I can generally schedule my travel. So I have uh uh a couple hours like every morning where I can just stream from the hotel, uh, from my hotel room. Uh, but when I’m traveling with family, with the wife and Children, it’s, it’s impossible. It’s, I just, I don’t have that kind of private space. Um, you know, we’re, we’re either staying with family or we’re all in a hotel room and it’s just so I apologize for not doing much of anything over July 4th week, but I do have a couple uh motorcycle trips coming up this year. I will be on the road and I will be live streaming without a tie from hotel rooms uh in various places in the uh Western US and British Columbia, Canada.
Uh but I, I do expect to be doing a show at least every other day. Uh Then we’ll see. Ok. All right.
Let’s take a look at super Chats. Uh And I know people were wondering about if I would have any co-host on. And uh it’s not that I’m not amenable to that. People were asking specifically about Nick Wta Nick’s my friend. He, he’s welcome to come on the show anytime I him and I talked by phone the other day.
And that, that’s basically what I told him. He, he’s, his schedule is sufficiently complicated that he can’t realistically live stream every minute of the trial like we did with Johnny Depp. Right.
Um So he has, he has other demands on his time, but I’ve told him anytime you want to. Come on, just let me know and we’ll make it happen. Same with Joe Nearman. Uh of course, same with Steve Gosney.
But, uh, you know, Joe has his own streams that he’s doing. I think he’s on a panel with a bunch of people and the panel thing is not for me. I, I’ve got zero interest in that. It just, it gets too noisy and complicated for me, uh trying to coordinate with other people.
Um But I told Joe and, you know, if Joe has free time and wants to come on, he’s, he’s always welcome. I’ll send them a link, same with Steve Gosney. Uh So, you know, the, the there, there are people who are, you know, welcome to come on any time because I, I’m 100{ebf8267f808eac43d24742043db51eeeb004db6334271e1bb6fe8c21c7925753} confident they add enormous value just like just like Adam Baldwin’s coming out on Sunday, add enormous value to uh to the show.
Check out super chats, nothing there. Rumble rants. Uh You know, I think one of the things that happened here from a practical perspective, this why this death occurred is, you know, the the gun safety rules are they’re highly redundant, right? Meaning you really have to break more than one to have a bad outcome.
Uh So think about the, the four rules of gun safety. Uh You assume every guns loaded until you insure otherwise, personally, uh you never put your finger on the trigger until you’re ready to shoot. You never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy and know your target, what’s behind your target beyond your target. If we just focus on the first thing, right. Presume the gun’s loaded unless you’ve cleared it, keep your finger off the trigger. Don’t point at anything you don’t want to destroy or kill. If you violate one of those three, you don’t have a terribly bad outcome.
right? So if uh if you put your finger on the trigger and you discharge the gun, as long as it’s pointed in a safe direction, no real harm results or if you put your finger on the trigger, but there’s no ammo in the gun, then no harm results, right? If you point the gun in an unsafe direction, but you don’t touch the trigger and there’s no live ammo in the gun, you don’t get a bad result. If you point the gun in an unsafe direction and you press the trigger as long as there’s no ammo in the gun, you don’t get a bad result. So you have to violate multiple safety rules to get a bad result by bad result.
I mean, of course, the death or maiming of a person and you can almost think of it as slices of Swiss cheese where the holes are offset from each other and they’re layered. So you might go through one hole on one layer, you broke one safety rule, but there’s not another hole lined up with that. So the next safety rule saves your butt. And the one after that saves your butt too because it’s also not a lot.
And one consequence of this is you can develop a habit of breaking one of those safety rules all the time. Like you’re sloppy with your trigger finger, discipline, your finger is always flopping on the trigger. That’s bad.
That’s not good. Right. Eventually you’re going to depress that trigger with sufficient force to drop the hammer, drop the strike or whatever the case may be. But if the gun’s never loaded and it’s never pointed in an unsafe direction, you don’t end up with a bad result.
And so you forget that your sloppy trigger finger is a very severe safety risk. The problem with that is what if the redundancy fails? What if you get Swiss cheese slices where the holes do line up? So when you, when you touch that trigger turns out there is old brown in the gun this time and it is pointed in an unsafe direction and then you kill Helena Hutchins. Um So II I think what might have happened now, this doesn’t excuse anything.
Guns are inherently dangerous instruments. If you don’t handle them with due care and circumspection, people die. That’s why we have involuntary manslaughter as a crime. But I’m I’m just saying it from a practical perspective. This may be how this happened for all we know Alec Baldwin has always been sloppy and unsafe with guns, but he always got away with it because the safety rules are redundant. And this time he just ran out of, it’s like the drunk driver.
Right? Drunk drivers don’t run people home every time they drive drunk from a bar. Right? 999 times out of 1000 they don’t want anybody over and then that 1000th time they, they do that doesn’t make it not vehicular homicide. That doesn’t make it not involuntary manslaughter just because it doesn’t happen. Often happens rarely. It’s, it’s a foreseeable risk, unjustified risk of death or serious bodily injuries to other. And you’re deliberately ignoring that risk when you Dr Dr drive drunk and you’re deliberately ignoring that risk of unjustified death to others.
When you take what you know, to be a real gun pointed at another human being, cock the hammer, press the trigger and you did not make sure there was no live ammo in that gun. That’s what makes Baldwin’s conduct, involuntary manslaughter. All right. I think that’s everything. One last check at Super Chats and then I’m gonna go home and eat some dinner and jump with the hot tub. It’s been a long day. Don’t forget Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.
Uh, we’re doing our trial recap. It will not be on social media. It’s only gonna be in our webinar. The webinar is 100{ebf8267f808eac43d24742043db51eeeb004db6334271e1bb6fe8c21c7925753} free. We don’t charge for it at all. And we’re gonna give away over $10,000 worth of prizes, folks.
A lot of our educational content, platinum membership, surprise, surprise gifts, uh, of a nature we’ve never given away before. And our buddy, uh, good friend Adam Baldwin will be on the show for a while too to talk about his experience handling guns in Hollywood. His take on the trial so far and I’m sure he’ll tell a few jokes and, uh maybe take some questions. I’ll see if he’ll take questions from the audience. Um And uh and then, but, but here’s the catch our webinar platform can only maxes out of 500 people first come first served.
So every stream we, we’ve done so far talking about this has been well over 1000 people. So that’s three times today. So uh those 500 seats are gonna go quick.
So if you’re interested, grab yours right away. Law of self-defense.com/trial recap. It’s the only place you’ll be able to see this. You have to be present to win one of our, these great prizes. More than $10,000 of prizes. Hang out with me, hang out with Adam Baldwin.
We’ll have lots of opportunity for Q and A and uh and that’s Sunday, but you have to grab your seat or scan that QR code uh or open up a window point your browser to Law of self defense.com/trial recap. All right, folks with that said, I’m going to go ahead and wrap up this show, uh, until tomorrow morning when you join me for day two of the Alec Baldwin manslaughter trial. Until then, I hope to see you all then and many more.
Uh, hey, hit, like, hit that, like thumbs up on the youtube. Subscribe until tomorrow morning. I remain attorney Andrew Branka for the law of self defense. Stay safe.
