'Rust' Armorer Given Maximum Sentence After Calling Jurors 'Idiots'
The armorer on the film “Rust” will serve 18 months in prison on a charge of involuntary manslaughter in the 2021 death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
The sentence is the maximum Hannah Gutierrez-Reed could receive, according to The New York Times. Hutchins was killed when actor Alec Baldwin fired a gun containing a live round on the set of the movie.
In March, Gutierrez-Reed was convicted of putting the live round in the gun. During her trial last month, she was painted as reckless on the set. An armorer is responsible for managing weapons and ammunition on a movie set.
The sentencing came after prosecutors released bits and pieces of calls Gutierrez-Reed made after her conviction while she was in jail.
Gutierrez-Reed called the jurors “idiots,” said the judge in the case was on a “power trip” and claimed the judge was “getting paid off.”
When it was Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer’s turn to speak, she let Gutierrez-Reed have it, sentencing her to the maximum possible time behind bars, according to The Washington Post.
“I find that what you did constitutes a serious, violent offense,” Sommer said.
“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,” she said.
“You were the armorer. The one that stood between a safe weapon and a weapon that could kill someone. You alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon,” Sommer said.
“But for you, Ms. Hutchins would be alive, a husband would have his partner and a little boy would have his mother,” she added, the Times reported.
Gutierrez-Reed’s defense had claimed that she was not given enough time to manage the set and that Baldwin failed to handle the gun properly, the Post reported.
“I beg you, please don’t give me more time,” Gutierrez-Reed said in a statement.
“The jury has found me in part at fault for this god-awful tragedy. But that doesn’t make me a monster. That makes me human,” she said.
But the prosecution said she deserved the maximum sentence.
“Every time a gun was loaded with ‘dummy’ rounds, it was a game of Russian roulette,” lead prosecutor Kari T. Morrissey wrote in a court filing ahead of the sentencing, according to the Times.
Jason Bowles, an attorney for Gutierrez-Reed, said the conviction and sentence will be appealed, according to the Post.
An effort to help Gutierrez-Reed was squashed when GoFundMe shut down a fundraiser for her because it broke the site’s rules of seeking money for “the legal defense of alleged financial and violent crimes,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.
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