‘Rust’ Prosecutor Withdraws Appeal of Alec Baldwin Case

The decision ends the criminal prosecution of the actor for the fatal shooting on a film set. During his trial, the judge dismissed the involuntary manslaughter charge against him.

The effort to prosecute Alec Baldwin for the fatal shooting of a cinematographer in 2021 ended on Monday when the special prosecutor withdrew her appeal of the judge’s decision to dismiss the involuntary manslaughter charge during the actor’s trial.

The prosecutor, Kari T. Morrissey, said in a news release that she was abandoning the case because the New Mexico attorney general’s office, which handles appeals of criminal cases, did not intend to “exhaustively pursue the appeal.”

“The state’s efforts to continue to litigate the case in a fair and comprehensive manner have been met with multiple barriers that have compromised its ability to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law,” the news release said.

Luke Nikas and Alex Spiro, lawyers for Mr. Baldwin, said in a statement that the decision was the “final vindication of what Alec Baldwin and his attorneys have said from the beginning — this was an unspeakable tragedy but Alec Baldwin committed no crime.”

The case in Santa Fe, N.M., was upended on the third day of Mr. Baldwin’s trial in July after his lawyers argued that the state had not properly disclosed certain evidence.

Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer of the First Judicial District determined that the evidence — ammunition delivered to the local sheriff’s office months before the trial — had been “intentionally and deliberately” withheld from the defense. She found that the state’s actions amounted to prosecutorial misconduct and dismissed the case without the potential for it to be retried.

Ms. Morrissey pushed back on the judge’s decision, filing a notice of appeal. Although she conceded that the state had failed to provide the defense with the ammunition in question, she argued that the evidence was not material to Mr. Baldwin’s defense and questioned the extent to which his legal team knew about it before the trial.

In the news release on Monday, Ms. Morrissey said she maintained those positions but could not pursue the appeal without the attorney general’s full backing. Mary Carmack-Altwies, the local district attorney who appointed Ms. Morrissey as special prosecutor, said in a statement that she supported the decision to withdraw the appeal.

On Oct. 21, 2021, Mr. Baldwin was filming the western “Rust” on a movie ranch outside Santa Fe when the gun he was positioning for the camera went off, firing a live bullet that killed the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and injured its director.

The movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who loaded the gun that day, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and is serving an 18-month prison sentence. She has appealed the conviction.

Mr. Baldwin, who still faces lawsuits that were brought against him after the tragedy, has not yet spoken publicly in detail about the prosecution. But on a podcast this month, he called the judge’s ruling a “very, very informed decision.” He lamented that his defense team had not been able to fully present its side of the case.

“There’s more to come, but the ‘more to come’ is now my effort, and it’s going to be undeniably a successful effort, to raise and to expose what really happened,” he said.

Mr. Baldwin has consistently denied responsibility for the shooting, asserting that he could not have fathomed that a gun he was handed on a movie set and was told was safe to handle would have contained a live round.

The unraveling of his trial centered on 23 rounds of ammunition that a man named Troy Teske — a friend of Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s father, a veteran Hollywood armorer — delivered to the local sheriff’s office on the day the armorer’s trial ended in March. Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers argued that the ammunition was relevant to the investigation into how six live rounds were brought to the movie set, but that the defense had not been provided them for review before the trial, as the law requires.

At the start of Mr. Baldwin’s trial, a crime scene technician testified that the ammunition had been inventoried under a separate case number from other “Rust” evidence. She also testified that the rounds delivered to the sheriff’s office did not resemble the ones found on the “Rust” set.

But when Judge Marlowe Sommer examined them in court, she found three rounds that looked similar to the ones from the film set. During the extraordinary court proceedings, Ms. Morrissey called herself as a witness in her own case to defend her handling of the evidence.

The judge wrote that one reason for dismissing the case was that Ms. Morrissey had elicited false testimony about the evidence while questioning the crime scene technician. Ms. Morrissey has argued in court papers that she believed the testimony to be true at the time based on photos of the ammunition.

Lawyers for Mr. Baldwin have long criticized Ms. Morrissey’s handling of the case and sought its dismissal before the trial, accusing her of “bad faith” motives for reviving the prosecution against him.

Ms. Morrissey has said that the prosecution was based on Mr. Baldwin’s violation of safety protocols on set, including pointing the gun toward Ms. Hutchins and failing to verify that the gun did not contain live ammunition.