Judge throws out most of Baldwin's lawsuit over Rust prosecution

Federal Judge Kea Riggs has dismissed most of Alec Baldwin’s civil rights lawsuit against the prosecutors who pursued the Rust case against him.

Riggs ruled the prosecutors are entitled to prosecutorial immunity, a legal protection that generally shields prosecutors from being sued for actions taken in their role bringing a case, according to Variety. The decision removes the bulk of Baldwin’s claims at an early stage.

Baldwin had sued alleging malicious prosecution over the 2021 accidental shooting that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the Rust set. Malicious prosecution, in plain terms, is a claim that a criminal case was brought without proper basis and with an improper motive.

His involuntary manslaughter trial ended abruptly in July 2024. Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer dismissed the case after the court learned that prosecutor Kari Morrissey had withheld evidence from the defence, according to Variety. Prosecutors and police had withheld evidence in the trial, Reuters reported at the time.

That dismissal was with prejudice, which means the charge cannot be brought again, PBS reported. Prosecutors later dropped their request to appeal after the July dismissal, according to ABC7 in December 2024.

The civil lawsuit named three prosecutorial defendants: Kari Morrissey, Mary Carmack-Altwies and Andrea Reeb. Riggs’s ruling favours all three on the core immunity question.

Not everything was thrown out. Claims based on Morrissey’s statements to the media and on her logging of a cache of bullets under a separate case number survived the motion to dismiss stage. A motion to dismiss is an early request to throw out a claim before full evidence is heard. Survival at this point does not decide the merits. It only allows those narrow issues to continue.

Those surviving claims focus on behaviour outside the courtroom advocacy that immunity normally covers. The court drew a line between decisions made as a prosecutor in the case and other acts.

Baldwin also sued Santa Fe County and sheriff’s investigators over their role in the investigation. The judge has not yet ruled on the county’s motions to dismiss those claims, so that part of the lawsuit is still waiting for a decision. No ruling has yet settled those remaining claims.