JFC, I hope there’s a real investigation and the people responsible get fired and prosecuted.
Someone, claiming to be a ‘retired cop’, came to the authorities claiming that some jackass mixed real bullets in with the blanks in the hope of causing an issue on set. The ‘retired cop’ brought some of those bullets and offered to testify under oath. The bullets were not added to evidence in the rust investigation, rather they were filed under a different ID so it was never turned over to the defense. I quote ‘retired cop’ because when this came up at trial, no one was even able to verify if they were actually a retired cop at trial. It appears that they either didn’t bother to validate it, or knew he was a retired cop and it was pretty damming that they suppressed the evidence. (there’s a bunch of other things here too, like the prosecutor knowing about these bullets but used a cell phone picture of them to ‘compare’ them to the bullets recovered on set and magically knowing they were totally different and not worth perusing but not filing charges against the ‘retired cop’ for interfering in the investigation)
The prosecution was either grossly negligent and ‘accidentally’ withheld evidence that could have been exculpatory. Or more likely deliberately suppressed it. Why deliberately? Apparently multiple witnesses the prosecutors interviewed told the defense that the lead procedure said some pretty vile things about Baldwin during the interviews. The lead prosecutor, under oath, was asked if she said these horrible things, and instead of denying it, said she something to the effect of ‘I don’t recall’. If you can’t recall if you called Baldwin a cock sucker during an interview, you shouldn’t be a prosecutor.
This was an absolutely bonkers prosecution and trial. It’s like if your mechanic overfills your tires to 90 PSI and you have a blow out and kill someone, and being prosecuted because you should have personally validated the tires were safe to drive on.
If anyone wants to see some vids:
Defense listing all of the issues: https://youtu.be/KbSSa9_HPl8
Lead prosecutor, testifying under oath for some reason, trying to cover her butt... This is not normal: https://youtu.be/WpDDsOBDwy0
The entire channel has a bunch of great clips from the trail, no commentary, just what happened.
This was BONKERS.
