Alec Baldwin's defense attorney questioned a crime scene technician over what he suggested were shoddy and subpar searches for the live ammunition that ended up in the actor's revolver and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
On the second day of Baldwin's New Mexico involuntary manslaughter trial, Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer sided with the prosecution in letting in key statements from the actor that demonstrate his knowledge of guns and the impact of blanks.
Earlier, Alex Spiro grilled Santa Fe County sheriff's technician Marissa Poppell in particular over search warrants served on a prop truck a week after the death of Hutchins on the set of the movie “Rust,” and on a prop warehouse more than a month after her shooting.
The questions eventually led to Spiro asking Poppell whether police and prosecutors "were just trying to get this over with so that prosecutors could focus on Alec Baldwin?”
“No,” she answered.
Spiro followed that with asking, “You personally believe that Alec Baldwin committed no crime, is that correct?”
Poppell answered “no” before special prosecutor Kari Morrissey objected and Marlowe Sommer struck the question and answer.
The questioning mostly centered on the searches of the truck and warehouse of Seth Kenney, an Albuquerque-based ammunition and weapons supplier to “Rust,” who forged a cooperative relationship with investigators in the immediate aftermath of the fatal shooting.
Spiro suggested that relationship may have been too close.
“There was a witness there who assisted in the search,” Spiro said when asking about the warrant served on the truck. “A man named Seth Kenney. And not only did he assist, he actually was the one that opened the safe.”
“Yes, he had the combination to it,” Poppell said.
Spiro asked, "Why did law enforcement wait a week to go to the prop truck?"
“The search warrant needed to be written,” Poppell replied. “I’m not sure why the time difference exactly.”
Spiro responded that a search warrant for the church building set where the shooting took place was obtained in a day.
“If you can do a search warrant in one day for one thing why does it take seven days for something else?”
Spiro asked Poppell, who found a half-dozen live rounds on the set, if she was surprised to find none in the truck.
“Not necessarily,” she said.
“You’re finding these live rounds all over the set, right?” Spiro asked. Poppell replied yes.
“You go a week later to the prop truck, which has all the ammunition right?” Spiro asked. “And there’s not a single live round there, right?”
Poppell replied “yes” to both.
“Let me ask you something,” the attorney said eventually. “At any point did you become suspicious of Seth Kenney?”
Poppell answered, “No.”
Kenney has not been charged with any wrongdoing. An email sent to his attorney seeking comment was not immediately returned.
Spiro also got Poppell to testify that it could be very difficult to tell the difference between dummy rounds made to appear as onscreen ammunition that were used on the set, and the live rounds that turned the set fatal.
It was an attempt to push back against the key assertion of prosecutors' case: that Baldwin recklessly flouted gun safety.
Poppell later testified that she and two police detectives searched every box in Kenney's warehouse in late November. Spiro picked apart the assertion and eventually got her to concede that some boxes were only shaken or briefly glanced into.
And he asked why apparently no surveillance video was collected from the site despite it being in the search warrant.
“You could have seen Seth Kenney disposing of ammunition in the 40 days between the incident and when you arrived,” Spiro said. And it “would've shown whether or not you all really searched the place."
Hutchins’ death and the wounding of director Joel Souza nearly three years ago sent shock waves through the film industry. The fatal shooting led to the felony involuntary manslaughter charge against Baldwin, the 66-year-old star of “30 Rock” and frequent host of “Saturday Night Live,” that could result in up to 18 months in prison.
His wife Hilaria Baldwin, younger brother Stephen Baldwin and older sister Elizabeth Keuchler sat behind him in the gallery again Thursday as the trial got off to a stumbling start on its second day.
Seated in two rows of eight each, jurors and alternate jurors scrawled notes as they listened to testimony. Jurors have their own close-up view of visual exhibits, with six monitors installed in the jury box.
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Dalton reported from Los Angeles.
