In the past week, America has seen two of the biggest problems with the American Judicial Court System. But the biggest problem is one that it shouldn’t be – biased.
On Friday, July 12, Alec Baldwin went to court on a trial on one felony charge of involuntary manslaughter in Sante Fe County, N.M. for his involvement in the Oct. 21, 2021 fatal shooting of Hayna Hutchins, a cinematographer on the set of Rust, an western Baldwin is starring in as well as producing. Baldwin claims that he just pulled the hammer on the revolver but didn’t pull the trigger. However the gun discharged and it struck Hutchins and director Joel Souza, who was injured but survived.
Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer dismissed the charge with prejudice, which means it can’t be refiled. The judge ruled the sheriff’s office and prosecutors committed misconduct by not sharing evidence with Baldwin’s legal defense over a box of live ammunition which had been turned over to them. Under guidelines on movie and TV productions, live ammunition is prohibited from being present on a set at any time. How it got on the set is a question that hasn’t been answered yet.
But even getting the case to trial this far makes you wonder if the authorities had it out for Baldwin, who is known for his political views which tend to be leftist. He famously played Donald Trump as a recurring character on Saturday Night Live, even winning an Primetime Emmy. He has been an outspoken celebrity over the years and gotten into legal and tabloid troubles. He once sprayed shaving cream on a paparazzi’s camera lens they were parked across from his property. A voice message of him getting angry and swearing at his daughter made the tabloid rounds years ago.
But as Hunter S. Thompson wrote in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, “Even a goddamn werewolf is entitled to legal counsel.” And that werewolf can only be charged if it’s committed a crime, not if it’s a werewolf. The question you have to ask is where do draw the line. In America, county sheriffs and district attorneys are elected. Yet they run as a member of a political party. Yet, judges have to be non-partisan. Also, judges are either appointed or run unopposed. If candidates for sheriff and/or D.A. only as members of one political party, the rest of the voters get screwed over.
I can understand taking a political side as legislators run at the local, state and federal office. But crime shouldn’t be a liberal vs. conservative issue. Also, what type of precedent would’ve it created if Baldwin had been tried and convicted?You must also presume a firearm is always loaded even when it’s not. You aim it away from people, animals, buildings, cars, etc. and toward the ground.
Yet, Baldwin was having to shoot a simple scene of him aiming a gun at the camera. If someone who is an armorer hands you a firearm, they’re taking the responsibility there are no live rounds in the weapon. How is this different than someone who gets new tires or a flat fixed and the tire isn’t placed back on the wheel rim probably. Usually this happens. It’s happened to two people I know on two different occasions. I also saw a police report where the tire came off and caused an accident as the motorist was driving away.
Should motorists double check the tires to make sure the nuts are tight and secure? It wouldn’t hurt. But if the motorist just paid a mechanic, the mechanic takes the responsibility, right? Can a motorist still be charged with involuntary manslaughter or negligent homicide if they didn’t know they had a loose tire? Accidents happen and sometimes people get killed.
This wasn’t the case in which Randall Miller, director of the abandoned Gregg Allman biopic Midnight Rider, disregarded refusals to film on the railroad tracks at a location in rural Georgia. It resulted in a camera operator dying when a CSX train came along the tracks. That was a case in which someone knew they were doing something illegal and put others’ lives including William Hurt, who was supposed to play Allman, in danger.
This has led to Hannah Guiterrez-Reed, the armorer on the set of Rust, to file a new motion to have her case overturn and thrown out. She was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in April and sentenced to 18 months. There is no updates at this time on how the courts have ruled on the new motion as it was just filed this earlier this week.
All I know is if you take the responsibility to be an armorer, you better know the difference between real live ammunition, blanks and dummy bullets. That was the case in 1993 when actor Michael Masse fired a revolver that was loaded with a blank but it had a discharged round in the barrel leading to the fatal death of Brandon Lee on the set of The Crow. This was part of cost-cutting ways to make dummy bullets out of real bullets. The gun wasn’t checked for safety before Masse was given it. He wasn’t charged.
However, Masse, who passed away in 2016, was mostly a character actor. He didn’t have the high-profile status of Baldwin. Both Sante Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza and District Attorney Mary Carmack Altwies are Democrats as is Baldwin. Still, this could have been a way for them to winning brownie points with voters to go ahead with this charge. Since Baldwin is credited as a producer, that might have been the loophole they were banking to charge him.
In other court-related news, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon made an outrageous ruling on Monday that Jack Smith, special prosecutor selected by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, didn’t have the authority to investigate and indict former President Donald Trump. Cannon was appointed by Trump himself in 2020. And a case like this, she should’ve recused herself from day one.
The timing is very suspect as it came two days after the assassination attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pa., as well as the start of the Republican National Convention. Cannon had also approved several requests by Trump’s legal team to extend pre-trial motions. An assassination attempt is not a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card especially since more and more people are saying Trump’s right ear was struck by shards of the teleprompter.
Smith has said he intends to appeal the decision and ask for a new judge. It’s very likely Smith will win his appeal and a new judge will be appointed. It just won’t happen in time before the November general elections. It’s a bush league psycho-out attempt by Cannon to delay the case and questions her abilities as a federal judge. She’s supposed to be impartial no matter what. Instead, it looks like she is collaborated with Trump and the Republican Party to give them some more breathing room.
It’s no different that all six of the U.S. Supreme Court who said the Washington, D.C. case in regards to Jan. 6 should go back to the lower courts are all appointed by Republican Presidents. Three of them, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Cavanaugh, were all appointed by Trump and all of them were done in very controversial appointments. Also, there’s questions of whether Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, was involved in any way with the insurrection coup attempt.
The Supreme Court was wise not to say that it is creating a king (or dictator), but it does seem like they’re saying that the President is above the law regardless. And this has always been the issue with courts as they tend to favor more people who have more wealth or more prestige. Look at the case involving the Phil Spector trial. Do you think it would have taken more than six years for a murder case to be properly adjudicated if Spector was just a regular Los Angeles person who took a woman home with him from a restaurant and then shot her?
Spector even fired his attorneys which gave him more time. I don’t think a judge in any other case would’ve been as lenient. I covered an aggravated assault and battery case in which a man stabbed his girlfriend multiple times and left her for dead in a ditch on a county road. (Georgia didn’t have attempted murder as a felony charge at the time.) Anyway, after they had selected the jury, he said he wanted a new attorney instead of the public defender. He said his family had just gotten the funds to retain the attorney that morning.
The judge denied the motion. It was a tactic to delay the trial. And even then when he was convicted, he used it as an appeal. The appellate court didn’t side with him. The attorney who the man was seeking later told me he hadn’t been approached by anyone to represent the man at trial.
That’s if you even make it to trial. A lot of times, prosecutors just want people to plead out so they can still get the win. But it hurts defendants because a trial is viewed even more like a severe punishment because the sentences are usually harsher. The U.S. Constitution is written that all Americans have the right to a trial. But in most cases, plea arrangements are made. The rationale is that prosecutors are overworked and a trial takes a lot of time for them.
I admit, for cases like murder, rape and aggravated assault and battery and aggravated robbery, we need to prosecute them to the full extent of the law. But busting people for smoking cannabis, which is just a plant, is foolish. You can go to a store and buy as much alcohol as you want, as much products like model glue and chemical cleaners to get high as you want to. But smoking a plant is illegal.
Maybe if prosecutors are overworked, we need to re-examine our judicial system. I believe that drug offenses should be handled with people getting help instead of going to prison. Most of the laws we have on the books is because some legislator at the state or federal level wanted to win votes or entice donors and lobbyists so these laws were pass. Some states have passed rules that you can’t collect rainwater. Hell, even some municipalities have issues with the length of the grass in your yard.
I got something for all you “Freedom Bros.” Say you live in a municipality in a state where you can go on vacation or are bedridden with the flu and a huge rainfall fills up a kiddie pool and cause the grass to grow higher than your neighbors. You’ve been unable to dump the water out and cut the grass. You can cited for both things happening. You don’t have freedom. You’re being squeezed. I remember I refused to cover a case in Americus, Ga., where a homeowner installed a new fence that was one or two inches higher than the regulations for the “Historical District.” Really? We’ve created so many of what I call “Puffy Pants” laws, it’s crazy in this country. (I call it Puffy Pants from an episode of The Simpsons where they try to fine the Hollywood producers for not wearing puffy pants.)
The Republican are all about law and order, unless it works against them. I’ve heard it for years as a crime reporter. Some people just think they are above the law. They’re someone’s brother or cousin. They threw the game-winning touchdown in high school so they should be allowed to go MMA on their girlfriend’s face for talking to another guy. Power and prestige gives people the big head.
Trump’s pardoning of Joe Arpaio, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and others just speaks to how he and the rest feel about our judicial court system. The sad part is we don’t really have a system in place that removes judges from office the same way you can remove someone in the private sector. Judges basically only have their peers to review their behaviors. And unless it’s something so bad, it rarely even makes a difference.
And judges were lawyers themselves. So they may be friendly with a prosecutor or lawyer which can also cause a bias. I had a lawyer’s wife tell me that a back-and-forth between a judge and lawyer over a piece of evidence was all for show. She said they’ll be playing golf together in another week having a laugh. And not much is done to hold bad judges and bad prosecutors accountable.
But sometimes, it’s bad blood between the prosecutors and the law enforcement officers. The only thing we as people can really hope for is the not break the law, even the minor stuff. Yet we seem to incarcerate more people than any other country. And people are going to prison for being unable to pay child support or fines and fees that are high because a municipality employed a third-party collection agency. You also don’t just get charged with a broken tail light but also reckless driving and defective vehicle. But even young kids in Pennsylvania for years were going to juvenile detention centers for stuff people do every day. One went to a center for saying he didn’t like a school administrator.
The question for those who support Trump is why do they keep supporting him when he has shown time and time again, he only supports those that are very important to him. He doesn’t care about the others. And you have to admit, people grow tired of seeing people getting slaps on the wrists when they know someone else would be profiled for no reason but the color of their skin.
We really need to overhaul our whole judicial court system. But until we’re really serious about making some big changes, it doesn’t look likely. Instead, what we really have in place is a system that scares people and extorts money out of them.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 