Two jurors from Alec Baldwin’s Rust case, which was dismissed this week, are speaking out.
Jurors Gabriela Picayo and Johanna Haag told The New York Times that they were skeptical of the prosecution’s evidence against the 66-year-old 30 Rock veteran. (If the case had not been dropped due to Baldwin’s defense counsel claiming that the prosecution had hidden evidence, all 12 jurors would have had to reach a unanimous judgment.)
Baldwin’s criminal charges were eventually withdrawn on July 12, almost three years after Rust cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was murdered when the revolver he was carrying was fired on set in October 2021. The director, Joel Souza, was also hurt.
“As the week went by, it just didn’t, it didn’t seem like a very strong case,” Haag, who works in advertising and marketing and was known as jury No. 7, told the Times.
Haag specifically recalls the prosecution presenting the jurors’ emotive police enforcement video from the gunshot aftermath. She claimed that Baldwin “looked shocked, stunned, and so sad.”
“It was clearly an accident, and the idea that there’s anything purposeful, or the idea that there was this grave carelessness that caused this, didn’t seem realistic to me,” Haag told the press.
Similarly, Picayo, a physicist who sat as jury No. 9, told the Times that Baldwin, as an actor, could not have been expected to know anything about gun safety and that he should have relied on the professionals on set.
“I think he would have trusted the people, you know, on the set to do their job,” remarked the actress.
Picayo also pondered on learning that Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed had previously been convicted of involuntary manslaughter. “I’m still here, I’m still open to hearing and obviously trying to stay unbiased,” she informed me, “but I was starting to move towards the direction of thinking that this was very silly and he should not be on trial.”
Still, she leaned against convicting Baldwin after the second day of the trial, noting that she “wasn’t presented with all of the evidence, so I don’t know what could have swayed me.”
The jury did not have to reach a judgment in the case, which was dropped when Baldwin’s lawyer Luke Nikas said that “critical” evidence — ammunition recovered by a guy called Troy Teske (a friend of the father of the guilty Rust armorer) — “was never disclosed to us.”
“At that point, I really started to feel sorry for Mr. Baldwin,” Haag told the audience. “I wondered, ‘What’s going on here? “What’s going on?”
According to the report, jurors learned of the dismissal of the case only after they were sent home and got a text from the court stating “Trail CANCELLED”.
Baldwin responded a day after the abrupt firing, noting in an Instagram message that there were “too many people who have supported me to thank just now.”
“To all of you, you will never know how much I appreciate your kindness toward my family,” his message said.
