She was in charge of keeping things safe, she failed in her responsibilities and someone died. She is at fault and should face the consequences.
What’s the ultimate goal? If it’s purely punitive, then sure.
But if the goal is anything other than that, I don’t see the point. It’s not any rehabilitation she needs would come in prison. It’s not like anyone who look at this and say “well, I can be careless and just bank on the cops fucking up,” so the deterrence is already there. And I can think of hundreds of better ways she can make it up to the victims.
So is that it? Is it really just about “facing the consequences?”
At what point do you think people should be held accountable for their actions? Her negligence CAUSED a death. She only got 18 months in jail and that’s too much?
At what point do you think people should be held accountable for their actions?
My view is very pragmatic: I believe punishments for crimes should be restorative, for rehabilitation, or act as a deterrent. I don’t see how any of these are met by her going to jail for 18 months.
I’ve answered your question, so I’ll try mine again: Is it simply about “being held accountable”?
It is. If there is no punishment for getting someone killed, then why would anyone give a shit at their job that involves safety? Airplane mechanics are held responsible for their failures, should we throw that out the window and when they forget to tighten down a bolt that drops a plane just say whelp, better luck next time, lets get George some more training and hope he follows the procedures that are in place to prevent that from ever happening again.
If there is no consequence, then there is no need for rules and laws.
Airplane mechanics are held responsible for their failures, should we throw that out the window and when they forget to tighten down a bolt that drops a plane just say whelp, better luck next time, lets get George some more training and hope he follows the procedures that are in place to prevent that from ever happening again.
You are joking, but that’s almost exactly what happens. Aircraft investigations are universally conducted on the basis of not assigning blame, but figuring out how to prevent this in the future.
The point is that airplane mechanics generally do not forget to tighten bolts out of pure evil intent. They are for the most part just ordinary humans who can be expected to behave as such. Therefore when an error occurs it is a failure of the system, not them personally. Replacing them with another human who makes human mistakes doesn’t fix anything.
In this case we ask the same thing: what happened that caused things to go so wrong on this set, and what can we change to prevent that from happening again? I’m quite certain that putting this person in jail is not the answer to that question.
In this case we ask the same thing: what happened that caused things to go so wrong on this set, and what can we change to prevent that from happening again?
What happened? She didn’t do her job.
How do you prevent it from happening again? Make sure there are repercussions for not doing your job. Something like maybe jail? That’s a pretty big deterrent.
Edit: I’m not big on sending people to jail. I do believe sex crimes, and violent crimes are 100% jail worthy. Drugs, theft shit like that, no. If you get someone killed because you didn’t follow what you are contracted to do, then yeah, I think you need to go to jail. Not for years, but 18 months, that might be a little long but it’s not unfair. You took a life.
Something you may have missed from one of EatATaco’s earlier comments:
It’s not like anyone who look at this and say “well, I can be careless and just bank on the cops fucking up,” so the deterrence is already there.
First time I downvoted you in this thread because …
If there is no punishment for getting someone killed, then why would anyone give a shit at their job that involves safety?
I explicitly covered this by saying noone is going to think “well, I’ll just be careless and bank on cops or prosecutors screwing up the case” so the deterrence factor is still there. Well, if there is someone that dumb, I doubt any deterrence is going to stop them.
I know right. The logic seems to be “well he didn’t get charged for it so I shouldn’t be either”. Yeah, but keeping weapons safe was your job, not his.
The case was dismissed because of misconduct by the police and prosecutors. It has nothing to do with being charged, he was charged. She’s saying the same thing happened in her case, so if his case was dismissed so should her conviction. So yeah, if the same misconduct happened, then it should obviously be overturned too.
And make no mistake about it, if you accidentally caused the death of someone, you would be looking for every opportunity to have the case dismissed too.
You think it was an accident? It was an accident she didn’t do her job? It wasn’t an accident, it was negligence.
Negligence and accidental are not mutually exclusive. Unless youre arguing that she intentionally had this person killed, my point still stands.
Sorry kid. Someone’s gotta swing and they weren’t ever going to let it be the rich guy.
I’m just gonna go ahead and say it.
Failing to tell the defense they had the bullets recovered on set is a freaking stupid move. Like it’s incomprehensible how a prosecutor of any amount of experience- or even an intern at the office in their first week- could make such an abysmally stupid mistake.
To put it another way: someone threw the case, intentionally.
Or, it really was a politically motivated trial and the prosecution was willing to cover up exculpatory evidence in order to manipulate the justice system. Either way, its damning.
I fail to see how the cartridges can possibly be exculpatory.
It doesn’t matter how they got in the gun, or if these were from a case on set. He doesn’t contest that that it went off while he was holding it. Only that it’s not his fault.
Manslaughter is about proving negligence or misconduct. The prosecution case was that Baldwin was at fault as he was negligent handling a gun with live ammunition.
Part of Baldwins defence was that he did not know the gun had a live round in it.
The new evidence was that the live ammo came from the props company, not the armourer, throwing doubt over whether the armourer or Baldwin knew there were live rounds on set or in the gun.
That’s a hugely important part of the defence case, and also makes it much hard to prove involuntary manslaughter - it would be negligent to fire a gun knowing there is a live round in it, but if you did not know there were live rounds then does that meet the same level of negligence?
Personally I thought the case against Baldwin seemed tenuous so I’m not surprised this new evidence ended the trial.
This does raise serious questions about the safety of the armourers conviction. She might still be negligent as its unclear how live ammo from the prop company got on set without her knowing but she has not been able to answer that as the evidence was suppressed and she was convicted on the assumption it was entirely her fault the live ammo was on set.
It raises even more serious questions about the behaviour and motivations of the new mexico prosecution team and investigators.
The problem with this statement is that prop/inert cartridges are labeled and identified as such in ways that are usually fairly obvious.
Like “loading” the cartridge with a steel ball bearing, and a used/fired primer cap (which has a divot from the hammer.) Thorough inspection would have identified them as inert.
While it’s remotely possible they were so well crafted as to be virtually identical, that kind of thing would end the props company. They are very careful to always make the marking conspicuous- as long as you know to look for it. (Another common option is a somewhat large hole in the side of the casing.)
And the indicators should have been gone over in a safety briefing so everyone knows. (And is trained in what to do on seeing a live round. “Hey! Live round! armorer!”)
In any case Baldwin had a duty of care to handle the firearm safely. Part of that includes knowing its state. He did not clear the fire arm, and did not know its state. It becomes self evident they were not inert cartridges but rather live rounds given that we’re talking about Alina being shot.
Man, you really don’t know anything about the case do you
If you’re driving and your brakes mysteriously fail, consequently someone dies. Is it manslaughter?
Edit: clarity.
Depends on why they failed and if you should have maintained your car better.
It’s usually not all that mysterious. Brakes don’t just randomly fail for no reason.
Let’s say they failed because of poor maintenance. Then yes.
Let’s say they failed because there was a defect in the brake line that caused it to rupture in the high temperatures of summer. Then no.
Baldwin failed a duty of care to ensure the weapon was cleared and in fact safe. He then failed a duty of care when handling that weapon in an extremely unsafe manner.
To go with the analogy, he knew his brakes were failing and drove anyway.
If you know your brakes are failing, and they fail… It’s not mysterious.
Then your analogy sucks. This wasn’t a random failure.
As I said in the reply: Baldwin knew- or should have known- that he was handling the firearm unsafely, and that he shouldn’t handle it in an unsafe manner,
No. But with the withheld evidence now known… The armorer herself may not have been convicted and she’s certainly getting retried.
Those mistakes didn’t happen in a vacuum. But proving where that vacuum came from doesn’t have the same certainty that it did.
Nah, this sort of shit happens all the time.
Baldwin just has the power and influence to fight the charge.
Not on high profile cases, no it does not.
(Well, excluding Trump trials … Trump truly hires the best.)
That’s not exactly surprising - I’m pretty sure a first-year law student would do as much. The real question is will it actually get dismissed. Normally I would suspect not, but we live in the weirdest fucking timeline, so who the hell knows.
deleted by creator
This case is weird. You have Trumptards wanting Baldwin imprisoned because he mocked Trump once on tv. Then you have bleeding heart leftists who simp for Hannah because muh mysoggyknee, muh classism, muh wimmin never dun nufin wrong. It’s a perfect storm of shitty people coming together for a wrong cause.
Classic example of poor/ lack of regulation in USA. (Mah freedum)
Obviously a prop weapon shouldn’t even be able to shoot real bullets.
This can easily be accomplished by making the prop weapon 1mm smaller, so real bullets can’t even be inserted.
To tell them apart the prop ammo could have a slightly toned line in the length of the bullet, which would be hard to see on film, because it look like a reflection, and could even be pointed away when filming. But would be easy to detect when holding the bullet, because the reflection wouldn’t move right when you hold it. It would work kind of like a watermark on bills.Why the movie industry hasn’t implemented better security themselves IDK, except the obvious, not doing it is slightly cheaper. Except the easier positive identification of a prop, would probably make for a smoother work flow, so even if the equipment is a bit more expensive, it would be recouped by smoother workflow, and zero accidents.
But by far the easiest and cheapest solution is a federal law, because that would standardize it for all.
I’m all for additional security measures but they flat out admitted to not checking individual ammunition (blanks, live, and dummie rounds), which already have visual and auditory differentiators. People didn’t take their jobs seriously and a woman is dead because of it, the change needed, regardless of anything else, is ensuring people take the fucking job seriously or everything gets halted on the spot before an accident happens.
I still don’t understand why they had live ammunition onset at all. Apparently it was there so they could shoot some Coke cans with the gums afterwards? If that’s the real reason she brought them she deserves to go down because that’s bloody stupid.
Obviously a prop weapon shouldn’t even be able to shoot real bullets.
I know a guy who teaches stage combat for live theater and have seen him on more than one occasion talk directors out of using prop firearms that fire blanks (think something akin to a starters pistol). These guns have filled barrels, etc. so there’s no way they could ever fire an actual projectile.
One of the huge problems with these sorts of guns is that they’re very prone to misfiring. For whatever reason the manufacturing quality of both starter guns and the blanks they use just isn’t as good as real firearms. The last thing you want in live theater (which I’ve seen more than once) is for an actor to pull the trigger and hear a click instead of a bang.
Granted they could just re-shoot a movie scene if this happens, but that costs time & money, which they absolutely hate wasting.
Your idea of using smaller caliber bores, etc. likely wouldn’t prevent this sort of thing because either the quality would again suffer due to the lack of demand, or some idiot would still produce real ammo for it, or at least a projectile firing blank.
Movies like Rust use revolvers because that’s what cowboys would have used. They want the guns to look real, which means the cylinder should look like it has real bullets in them and not blanks, especially in close-up shots where you can clearly see a gun. That’s ultimately what killed Brandon Lee on his movie set. The special effects team botched rigging the bullets so they wouldn’t fire. They removed the powder but didn’t remove the primer cap, and at close range that was still enough to cause trauma when Lee was shot.
I also know a guy with 40+ years in the movie special effects industry who actually writes OSHA safety regulations for the industry. They’re “written in blood” due to events like Brandon Lees death, and when followed properly everybody is safe. He wasn’t involved in any way with the Rust production, but he was extremely pissed when he started hearing what’s been reported. He said it sounds like pretty much everybody involved from the producer on down ignored those regulations, and he had no problem with folks like Baldwin facing charges as a result.
Minor nitpick: the primer in the botched dummy cartridge wasn’t enough to fire the bullet, but it was enough to unseat to it from the case and lodge it in the barrel. Later, a normal blank cartridge was fired while the bullet was still stuck in the barrel. The powder in the blank was enough to dislodge the bullet and propel it to lethal velocity.
I work film and am outraged at the dismissal. What a lot of people neglected to grasp is because they were focused on whether or not Baldwin pulled the trigger is that the trigger wasn’t completely relevant to the crime.
Even if Baldwin wasn’t the one holding the gun, even if was in the hands of a completely different actor, he should have been charged as part of the Producers for failing to provide a safe work environment. When these sort of things happen we should be asking who was in charge of providing a safe environment, were they made aware of the dangers and why didn’t they stop them. If you are fronting the money, have creative control and hiring and firing power and are cced on safety issues your crew brings up as concerns it’s your duty to make sure your crew is safe… And there were so many red flags on Rust you could have seen them from fucking space. People were leaving the show because they didn’t feel safe. Saying a seasoned actor / Producer would have been unaware while not just being on set but directly interfacing with the process is complete ludacris.
We talk about Brandon Lee but we should be talking about Sarah Jones. When she was killed by unsafe choices made by Production three out of four Producers on the project, everyone who could not claim complete perfect ignorance of the choices made, were charged criminally.
This is a sad day for American film labor. Appearantly bosses have no direct liability to keep us safe anymore.
I bet Baldwin could still be found liable in Civil court for the reasons you’ve mentioned…
This can easily be accomplished by making the prop weapon 1mm smaller, so real bullets can’t even be inserted.
You may soon learn about different calibres. Firstly, they exist.
8mm parabellum, 6.62x51, 6.62x39, 4.46x45, 11.7x108…
Fuck yeah, Hollywood getting away with killing an employee.
Seems like a little more than just Alec Baldwin heading an extraordinarily sloppy production. HG-R still did not do her job but if they both went to prison you’d feel like justice was done knowing evidence like this was withheld?
I don’t particularly think any kind of ballistics on the bullets is really going to change the out come of the trial. They could have easily omitted them and still had a rock-solid case.
Like, Baldwin is not disputing that he was holding the gun that killed her. Just that it was his fault.
HGR, that other producer. Baldwin. They can all share full guilt for what happened.
The armourer hands the actor a safe gun, the actor uses it.
If the gun isn’t safe it’s not the actor’s fault.
First, no. That’s wrong.
Hollywood movie industry doesn’t write law. New Mexico law says Baldwin was being negligent, and that negligence resulted in some one’s death. This is a crime.
If a lawyer tells you it’s okay to go 80 in a 55, and a cop writes you a speeding ticket, you don’t get to pull “advice of counsel” as a defense to get out of it, because the lawyers advice is obviously unreasonable and incorrect.
Alternatively, if you call a mechanic and describe some brake symptoms and he says it’s safe to get it into the shop without a tow, and you get into an accident because the brakes failed… the mechanic is not liable for that, ultimate liability rests with the driver. The mechanic didn’t know the full circumstances.
Similarly, even an idiot could be reasonably expected to recognize that it’s unsafe to point a functional firearm at people and pull the trigger (or otherwise waive it around like a toy.) therefore, an expert’s advice to the contrary is quite unreasonable and on its own face should have been ignored; and HGR was unaware of his actions with the weapon as she was not immediately present.
Therefore, Baldwin failed a duty of care to behave in a safe manner (aka he was negligent,) and some one died (homicide- probably invol. Manslaughter or whatever the specific term is.) It also goes out the window when you recognize that HGR was in fact not an expert. She was a laughably inexperienced neppo-baby and we all know it. (She was also hired because she was inexperienced and allowed things that she should not have. This benefitted the production by reducing slow downs in filming.
Now to the second point:
Baldwin did not receive the weapon from HGR- he received from an assistant producer (who plead guilty, too.)
So no. He didn’t receive it from your “expert”.
Doesn’t someone have to be convicted of a crime to have the law saying you’re negligent?
Nope.
The law describes behaviors/actions/stuffs that are or are not crime. Murder is defined as the unjustified killing of a human. (Usually.) there are then variations of “murder”.
Specifically to New Mexico, Involuntary manslaughter :
Manslaughter is the unlawful killing of a human being without malice.
….
B. Involuntary manslaughter consists of manslaughter committed in the commission of an unlawful act not amounting to felony, or in the commission of a lawful act which might produce death in an unlawful manner or without due caution and circumspection.So any behavior that fits that is, by definition invol. Manslaughter.
I’ve added emphasis to the relevant bit here. Let’s break it down.
- Baldwin was preparing to shoot a sequence of a western movie. This is a lawful act.
- he was handling a firearm. This might produce death.
- he was handling the weapon in an unsafe manner; that is, without due caution.
- these things resulted in Alina dying.
This also gets into presumption of innocence. It’s a procedural presumption. It’s a very important procedural stipulation meant to protect the civil liberties of the accused. (It’s violated on a regular basis but that’s a different matter.)
Regardless, the crime happened. If you’re guilty of a thing, you are guilty regardless of if you are caught, or discovered, or accused or even indicted or they blame some one else. None of that changed that you did that thing and are guilty. The trial doesn’t magically guilty- you are found to be guilty.
Like how fossils are found. They’re always there. Just because we don’t know that they’re there, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. The fact of their existence is immaterial to any one’s knowledge of that fact.
Similarly, the fact of one’s guilt is immaterial to anyone’s knowledge of that fact. (For example, a drunk driver so heavily inebriated they don’t realize they ran some one over. Or hunters plinking in the woods unaware that kids were playing behind their targets.)
The court procedural rules say he is presumed to be guilty until the fact of his guilt is found in a court of law.
He committed actions which are defined as being involuntary manslaughter.
He doesn’t get to say he was behaving with due care because there was an inexperienced, inept armorer, somewhere around there. That’s not how it works.
From an occupational accident perspective, it doesn’t matter that there was a “safety coordinator”, it’s still unreasonable behavior that lead to Alina dying, as an employee (and employer, but that’s a different set of charged ) he has an obligation and duty of care to maintain a safe working environment- and to report unsafe environments.
But he’s not charged with a crime and will never be in relation to this tragic accident.
Remember, she filed a safety complaint against the production precisely because of all this. Alina was a union whistleblower who turned up dead.
I rarely comment, but your statement is factually incorrect on a few points. I assume when you stated “Alina”, you are referring to Halyna Hutchins. There were safety complaints filed by other production members, but not by her. The way you framed this statement also implies she may have been killed as retribution because she filed a safety complaint, which again, she did not.
If there is a credible source that the victim in this tragedy filed a safety complaint before her death, I will happily amend or delete my comment. I’m not trying to start a flame war or anything and this is certainly no attack on you personally, it just bothers me when I see misinformation.
I rarely comment, but your statement is factually incorrect on a few points. I assume when you stated “Alina”, you are referring to Halyna Hutchins
I apologize for a friggin typo. That’s not a factually incorrect statement, however.
There were safety complaints filed by other production members, but not by her. The way you framed this statement also implies she may have been killed as retribution because she filed a safety complaint, which again, she did not.
From Wikipedia:
There were safety complaints filed by other production members, but not by her. The way you framed this statement also implies she may have been killed as retribution because she filed a safety complaint, which again, she did not.
This makes her a whistleblower and provides (possible) motivation. Do you have any idea how much it costs for a single day of shooting? Proper safety protocols would have slowed down production, increasing costs.
I’ve been unable to find information on who actually filed those complaints, and assume the union wouldn’t tell management who did- and I would be shocked if they did (that’d make them rats.)
Something to think about when Baldwin puts on his most sincere act ever and insists it was an accident and not his fault.
Also as a side note, there’s apparently a small technical mistake that HGR was in fact not the armorer (her contract for that apparently expired a few days earlier.)(she was still acting as armorer even if she wasn’t technically designated as such,)
Should proofread your posts
what, and deprive you of the opportunity to add nothing of substance?
