West Michigan's Morning News
Alec Baldwin Trial Begins
about it. And this is West Michigan's morning news. Steve Kelly, Brett Bakeda, Lawrence Smith, will be back with us in about an hour and a half, nearly three years after the shooting death of that Rust cinematographer. It appears as if Alec Baldwin is headed to trial, jury selection is finished now. Let's get to the very latest from New York City Fox News Radio's Tonya G. Powers. Thanks for doing this today. Of course. Thanks for having me on. So we have jurors selected on this thing and we're moving forward. Yeah, it took about a day. We'll list a day to seek jury. And it's about pool of about 70 potential jurors and then threw an ask question. There was a delay yesterday. It turned out that they were having some technical issues. Also, I understand that there was a problem with with with heat. They had to move courtrooms. But the time they got all that done, I think there was like a couple of hours that had been had already been taken up with all of that. They finally got to jury selection. They didn't take long. They asked they were asked if any any of them had strong opinions on gun safety, whether somebody can rely on an expert to ensure the safety of a gun, not just the person who's handling it. Most of them when they were asked questions about this, that they always treat firearms like they're loaded, even if they aren't. These were kind of some of the questions posted jury. The jury seated is 11 women and five men. And they're going to start hearing an opening statement today. I guess two of them haven't heard of Alec Baldwin before. I'm sure Alec Baldwin doesn't want to know that. But one of the things that they argued about was, will it be admissible? Or can they talk about the fact that he's a producer along with what was the significance of that? Yeah, there was a there was a hearing on Monday. It went on for a while, by the way, but it did give some really interesting insight as to what we can kind of expect from from this trial, I think. And one of the big things that was was back and forth over this were these both sides were basically presenting their arguments to the judge over what the jury should be hearing and weren't allowed to hear or the ins and outs of what they were actually going to be doing at the trial. And the role of producer think it was one of those things, like you said, it took up a good deal of time because the prosecution was like, well, he not only was an actor, he's a producer, so he has a higher level of responsibility here because of his role as a producer. And his lawyers were like, he was not a producer when he was holding the gun. He was an actor. So that's one of the things they were arguing about. And eventually the judge said, okay, well, we're not going to be, the jury's not going to consider his role as a producer. They're going to consider his role as being an actor holding the hold handling of the gun when it, as he said, he's claimed that it fired accidentally, that he was following instructions to point it toward Helena Hutchins, who was the cinematographer behind the camera. She is, of course, the person who was killed in this incident. Director Joseph Sousa was hurt. So, you know, another thing that they argued over on Monday was which people would be allowed to present evidence. There was some back and forth over where are they going to allow, would the judge allow other, you know, people on the crew to testify in this, you know, with, you know, and his lawyers were like, these people aren't experts. And, you know, the prosecution kept saying, well, yes, that they're on, they've been on movie sets. They know what's expected on a movie set and what is normal, you know, behavior as far as safety concerns, that kind of thing. You know, these are the people who literally are having these things, you know, these guns and things around them all the time, pointed at them in some cases. You know, so that's, it was very insightful as to, you know, what we can expect from both sides of this. I find this, this is going to be an interesting trial and it's going to be a live stream, so people can actually watch this one. That's what I was just going to say. You can find it on YouTube with court TV and law and crime network, right? There's probably many outlets you can find it from. I'm not sure, but I would assume court TV would have to do things like write down their alley. Tanya Jay Powers with Fox News Radio in New York. Thank you for your time this morning. True. Thank you.