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Alec Baldwin lost his bid to dismiss his involuntary manslaughter indictment Friday when a New Mexico judge ruled he still must face trial even though the FBI damaged the gun involved in the shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. In an 18-page ruling issued Friday, Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer wrote that “a significant amount of evidence indicates that the unaltered firearm did not possess apparent exculpatory value” before it was damaged in forensic testing months after the fatal shooting. She specifically pointed to statements Baldwin made to a New Mexico Occupational Health and Safety Bureau Officer in which he stated, “The problem didn’t have to do with the gun. It had to do with the bullet.” Importantly, Judge Marlowe Sommer ruled that they saw no evidence that investigators or prosecutors knew the gun possessed possible “exculpatory” value before an FBI technician started whacking it with a rawhide mallet. “The court concludes that defendant fails to establish that the state acted in bad faith when destroying certain internal components of the firearm in the course of accidental discharge testing,” the judge wrote. She ruled that once Baldwin’s trial begins next month in Santa Fe, prosecutors will be required to “disclose the destructive nature of the testing, the resulting loss and its relevance.” Baldwin then will be able to cross-examine the state witnesses to set forth his theory that the gun may have been modified before the shooting and may have been defective. Baldwin and his lawyers argued in their underlying dismissal motion that the “extremely aggressive” tests performed on the gun in an FBI lab irreversibly damaged the single-action revolver and thereby “deprived” the actor of any chance to test a “core component” of his defense. They claim the firearm already was defective when the deadly accident occurred on Oct. 21, 2021. The controversial FBI tests involved a rawhide mallet striking the gun repeatedly from different directions to see if it would fire without someone pulling the trigger. The testing was meant to evaluate Baldwin’s claim the gun simply “went off” and fired the fatal shot on the set of the western movie Rust without a trigger pull. The FBI tests ultimately fractured the trigger sear. Prosecutors say the tests also shaved off the full-cock notch of the gun’s hammer. Baldwin’s lawyers argued during a recent two-day hearing that it’s impossible to determine how defective the gun may have been before the “destructive” testing because it wasn’t disassembled to document the internal components ahead of time. They argued the mallet testing made “no sense” because no witness ever claimed the gun was dropped or hit with “blunt force” before it fired. Prosecutors countered that they only authorized the mallet testing after the FBI completed its core battery of tests and reported that the gun functioned normally upon arrival, meaning it wouldn’t fire from a cocked position absent a trigger pull. According to Baldwin and his lawyers, the mallet testing “so thoroughly demolished the gun” that prosecutors had to hire experts to replace several internal components for follow-up analysis. They said New Mexico investigators were warned the mallet testing would most likely damage the gun, but they failed to ask the FBI to document the original condition of the internal components and failed to alert Baldwin that “a key item of evidence was about to be destroyed.” “This is some of the most egregious conduct with respect to the destruction of evidence you will find,” defense lawyer John Bash argued to the court Monday. “They got to do all their own analysis of the gun, and we never got to do it – and will never get to do it,” Bash said. “No one cared about the rights of the defendant.” While prosecutors have alleged the gun was in “perfect working order” before the mallet testing because it test-fired 12 times without incident and because Baldwin told investigators it showed no mechanical defects leading up to the deadly shooting, Bash argued that the testing was inadequate. “We all know that when machines don’t work correctly, they’re not not working correctly every single time. I had a key that one out of every 10 times, it wouldn’t turn my lock. The other nine times, it worked fine. Sometimes these things happen randomly, if it’s hit at a certain angle.” He said the defense was denied access to “potentially exculpatory” evidence in an “outrageous” violation of due process. “There’s clear bad faith,” he said. In testimony last Friday, FBI forensic examiner Bryce Ziegler told the court that he conducted the 12 test firings and found that the prop gun — a real revolver made to look like a 19th-century Colt revolver by Pietta Firearms in Italy — functioned normally upon arrival at his FBI lab. He described specifically testing to make sure the gun wouldn’t simply fire if his thumb slipped off the hammer. He said the “notches” that catch the hammer in the half-cock and quarter-cock positions properly engaged, meaning they stopped the hammer from hitting the firing pin, absent a
