Alec Baldwin Trial Ends On 'Technicality' Also Known As 'Basic Constitutional Rights'
This is the story. Of a precedent named Brady...
(Photo by Ross D. Franklin – Pool/Getty Images)
As terrible legal takes go, one of the most engrained in society is the myth of the “technicality.”
Alec Baldwin’s involuntary manslaughter trial ended abruptly on Friday when Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer dismissed the case based on previously undisclosed evidence. Thus starting the clock to the inevitable “technicality” discourse.
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Score one for Elon’s community notes.
By “ridiculous technicality,” she means “basic constitutional rights.” In the case of a Brady violation, the right to not have the prosecution using its control of evidence to prevent the accused from mounting a defense.
Baldwin’s gun was loaded with live rounds instead of blanks — a mistake that led to the death of the cinematographer — making the source of the ammo and how it made it on set central to Baldwin’s defense.
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Law enforcement received a box ammunition from a source claiming that it might’ve been connected to the shooting. But prosecutors decided not to tell Baldwin’s team about the existence of the bullets they received. In their own defense, prosecutors downplayed the significance of the ammo.
But that’s not a decision prosecutors get to make for defendants.
After putting the trial on hold to dig into how this evidence came to be hidden from the defense, the judge determined that — with jeopardy already attached — there could be no cure for the constitutional violation but dismissal with prejudice.
The “sleazy defense lawyering” jab is another bad courtroom drama trope. If the ammunition is so obviously irrelevant, then prosecutors should have no problem proving that. When they instead go to the trouble of hiding it from defense attorneys, it’s a pretty good sign that the sleazy lawyering is happening at the other table. And, to be clear, the prosecution didn’t just “not disclose it,” they had it marked entirely separately from the Baldwin case so that it wouldn’t show up in any records of evidence gathered for the case.
They didn’t even bother to do their own tests on the ammo to see if it might be related, almost as if they thought building a case for its irrelevance might accidentally turn something up. Better to simply memory-hole it while trying to secure a conviction.
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Pretty egregious stuff.
But defense attorneys were quick to note that as egregious as this case may seem, Brady violations happen all the time and courts routinely play games with “materiality” or, after the fact, “harmless error,” to bulldoze past the constitutional deficiencies. The warning offered by more than one attorney on social media was to imagine how often these abuses happen in cases without Hollywood media attention.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
