Thursday 11 November 2021

Good Luck With The SODDI* Defence In This Case, Love...

A lawyer for the armorer who oversaw weapons used on the Rust movie set suggested on Wednesday that someone deliberately put a live round into the gun used by Alec Baldwin when he accidentally shot dead a cinematographer.

Well, yes. It didn't load itself, did it?  

Jason Bowles said his client, Hannah Gutierrez, had pulled ammunition from a box that she believed contained only dummy rounds that were incapable of firing.
He said he thought it was possible that someone purposely placed real bullets, which look similar to dummies, into the box.

Errr...isn't she supposed to be an expert? Is 'look similar' what he's hanging his hat on, when his client should know the difference? 

“We’re not saying anybody had any intent there was going to be a tragedy of homicide,” he added, “but they wanted to do something to cause a safety incident on set. That’s what we believe happened.”

Why would anyone want to do that, why would anyone need to do that, when by all accounts there were already lots of safety incidents on set?

*Some Other Dude Did It

3 comments:

The Jannie said...

Yes, an expert who. when loading a handgun, couldn't tell the difference between a heavy live round and its harmless, much lighter, blank cousin . . . Unfortunately that was just one page of the catalogue of breaches of firearm safety on that set.

Anonymous said...

Is the brief saying that his client the armourer left boxes of rounds lying around unattended, open to tampering, theft, whatever? As a defense? Sounds like admitting criminal negligence! (When I was trained, in the UK military, rounds were rounds, didn't matter if they were live, blanks or dummies, they were all held secure.)

JuliaM said...

"Unfortunately that was just one page of the catalogue of breaches of firearm safety on that set."

It's becoming quite the weighty tome already, and the lawyers haven't finished yet!

"Is the brief saying that his client the armourer left boxes of rounds lying around unattended, open to tampering, theft, whatever? As a defense?"

I know, if a woman hadn't died so tragically, I'd be getting out the popcorn...