Baldwin Defenses Soon to be Tested

I am reading about Alec Baldwin, who is soon to be tried for manslaughter in the shooting death of Halyna Hutchins, whom he shot on a film set along with a hapless director.

I have written about this before. It seemed to me that he had no conceivable defense, and the defenses he was blathering on the web were more harmful than helpful. I guess his ego could not accept the notion that his lawyer might know more than he when he advised Baldwin to stay silent. I’m sure his lawyer gave him that advice, because only an idiot would not.

Baldwin had a firearm in his hand. Not a fake gun. A real revolver suitable for use as a self-defense weapon. The revolver had at least one real round of ammunition in it. Baldwin pointed the gun at two people, and the gun fired. Baldwin says 1) he never pulled the trigger, and 2) he relied on employees to make sure the gun was safe before he handled it.

Assertion 1 is a lie, so there is not much point in elaborating. The gun was designed so it could not be fired without pulling the trigger. This information is in the manual, which you can find online.

Assertion 2 is more complicated.

Baldwin is accused of negligent homicide. In legal terms, “negligence” means 1) you owed someone else a duty of care, and 2) you failed to exercise care.

To determine whether Baldwin owed his victims (he hit two people) a duty of care, you have to come up with a standard. What is the standard of care for a person holding a revolver?

You have to start with the standard of care every responsible gun owner knows. There are four rules.

1. Treat all guns as though they were loaded.

2. Always keep your firearm pointed in a safe direction.

3. Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.

4. Be sure of your target and what’s beyond it.

There are different versions of these rules, but they all mean the same things.

There is another rule: when you handle a gun, ALWAYS check to see if it’s loaded. Doesn’t matter if your best beer buddy swears he just checked it. You have to check for yourself.

Are there times when you can’t obey these rules? Maybe, if you’re an actor. Actors sometimes have to point props that look like guns at themselves or others. But these days, prop providers have all sorts of props that look exactly like guns on film, yet are obviously not guns in the minds of the people who hold them. There are prop guns that are made entirely of things like rubber and plastic. There are prop guns that have no moving parts.

There must have been many scenes in which actors have pointed clearly-fake props at people. On the other hand, it appears there have been many times when actors have pointed real guns at other people. I’ve seen scenes where actors pulled the triggers on revolvers that were aimed at other people, and the triggers, cylinders, and hammers moved.

Baldwin knew his gun was real, and he still pointed it at another actor. He said he would never do that, but obviously, he did, because if he hadn’t, he would have missed his victims.

Baldwin didn’t treat the gun as though it were loaded, he aimed at a person deliberately or carelessly, and he put his finger on the trigger when he didn’t intend to shoot anyone. He broke three of the basic safety rules. The fourth didn’t apply to him because he didn’t have a target. He didn’t intend to shoot.

What I wonder is whether he can be held responsible for breaking the other rule.

Ordinarily, you have to check to see if a gun is loaded as soon as you take possession. But would that have made sense for Baldwin? What if the gun were ordinarily loaded with dummy bullets that looked like the real thing? If that’s how it worked, maybe it would be unfair to expect Baldwin to check all over again. Maybe as an ignorant actor who knows little about guns, he isn’t qualified to decide whether a round is real or fake.

If that’s the case, then it would make sense to hold the armorer responsible for checking the gun.

So maybe it’s wrong to say Baldwin should have examined the gun before picking it up. Maybe it would have looked the same regardless of the type of ammunition it contained.

Still, though, he broke three of the other 4 rules. You only have to break one rule to be negligent. I’m sure Baldwin’s lawyers will try to make the jury forget that.

If he hadn’t put his finger on the trigger, he wouldn’t have fired. If he had treated the gun as though it had been loaded, he wouldn’t have fired. If he had pointed the gun in a safe direction, he wouldn’t have hit anyone.

His lawyers are going to attack a couple of ways.

They will say the gun could have fired without Baldwin pulling the trigger, and that the state can’t prove otherwise because the FBI damaged the gun while testing it. They will also say Baldwin’s standard of care should be the standard of care movies stars usually employ on movie sets. They’ll say the famous rules everyone else obeys don’t apply to actors because movies hire armorers to make sure guns are used safely.

The argument about the trigger is somewhat ridiculous. I don’t expect it to go anywhere. The gun’s parts still exist. The gun has been repaired. It should be possible to use the damaged parts to show that before they were damaged, the gun would only fire when the trigger was pulled. It will definitely work that way in the repaired state.

It’s an argument designed to appeal to dumb jurors and biased jurors. If Baldwin’s lawyers pick the right jury, maybe they’ll get somewhere, but it doesn’t look good.

As for claiming movie stars live by different rules, it’s a bad argument that should fail. The fact that you’re making a movie doesn’t mean you have the right to loosen good rules that save lives and which everyone else has to obey.

A real firearm on a movie set is just like a real firearm anywhere else. People on a movie set are just people. It may make sense to abandon the rule saying Baldwin had to check the gun, because it may have been impractical and an expert had been hired to do it for him, but the other four rules are personal to the shooter.

He still seems guilty to me. I see no way to raise reasonable doubt. His best hope is a stupid jury or a jury containing a few fans. He needs a jury like the one full of black women who refused to convict O.J. Simpson. Simpson could have set his ex-wife on fire at a nationally-televised press conference, and those emotional, racist women would have sent him home.

My best guess is that he’ll be convicted. He has refused a plea, and it has been withdrawn. Was that his idea, because he can’t believe the minor god Alec Baldwin could be convicted, or did it come from his lawyers? Do they reasonably think they can win? Are they bad lawyers who give bad advice? No way to know, but that plea may look really good to Baldwin in a few months.

The armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was convicted by 7 women and 5 men after only three hours of deliberation. Not a good sign.

I’m assuming Baldwin gets tried on the merits. Guilty people get their cases dismissed all the time, based on government errors and malfeasance. If the state dropped the ball somewhere down the line, the facts and the law surrounding the shooting won’t matter.