After nearly two years on trial, Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed was sentenced by a New Mexico judge for her involuntary manslaughter charge. According to the judge, Gutierrez Reed will serve 18 months in prison starting Monday.
Her sentencing comes nearly a month after she was found guilty of the accidental death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and the injuries of director-writer Joel Souza. At the same time, Gutierrez Reed was acquitted of evidence tampering charges. When she was convicted, both the prosecution and defense argued over the appropriate punishment.
Her defense team argued that Gutierrez Reed was the alleged victim of an unsafe working environment and had shown great remorse for Hutchins’ death and the events leading up to it. Because of this, Jason Bowles proposed that she should be placed on probation and undergo rehabilitation. Guttierez Reed expressed these sentiments, asking the judge to be put on probation instead of staying imprisoned. “Your honor, when I took on Rust I was young and I was naïve, but I took my job as seriously as I knew how to. Despite not having proper time, resources, and staffing, when things got tough I just did my best to handle it,” she explained. “The jury has found me in part at fault for this godawful tragedy, but that doesn’t make me a monster, that makes me human.”
However, the prosecution insisted that Guttierrez Reed was allegedly negligent and should never have been put in charge of weapons. Prosecutor Kari Morrissey accused her of allegedly ignoring safety checks and leaving the set as soon as the gun misfired. To Morrissey, despite supposedly having six live rounds, “she failed to ferret them out for 12 days. What that means is that she wasn’t shaking any dummy rounds, she wasn’t testing anything.” Because of this, the team pushed instead for an 18-month sentence, the maximum amount for involuntary manslaughter.
Even the New Mexico judge shared these sentiments in his final sentence reading. He paid no mind to Guttierez Reed’s alleged remorse and apology, claiming that she “said [she was] sorry, but not [that she] was sorry for what you did.” The judge proclaimed, “Ms. Hutchins would be alive, a husband would have his partner, and a little boy would have his mother” if Gutierrez Reed had performed her responsibilities. “You alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon.”
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