Jason Bowles, Esq.: Defense Attorney for the Rust Armorer

We were honored to host Jason Bowles, Esq., the Albuquerque criminal defense attorney who represented Hannah Gutierrez, the armorer in the Rust movie case, as our April 2024 White Collar Support Group Tuesday Night Speaker Series presenter. Jason joined us from Panama, weeks after a New Mexico jury convicted his client of involuntary manslaughter, and gave us the case from the defense table. You can watch the full recording above.

Days into it, with no discovery in hand and the state already commenting on his client’s guilt, Jason went on the Today show and Good Morning America and said out loud that somebody had put live rounds on that set on purpose. His only source was his client’s father. Give it the hour if your own case is being argued in the press before you have seen the evidence, or if you want to understand how a workplace accident becomes a felony.

Why he took the sabotage defense to national TV before discovery

The call came in early November 2021 from a civil attorney friend with a case she thought he might want. It involved Alec Baldwin. Within days NBC and ABC both wanted them.

What he had to go on was Hannah’s father, Del Reed, a Hollywood armorer of more than fifty years who worked on Tombstone and taught Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington and Sharon Stone to shoot. Reed needed about a minute with the facts, and Jason took his conclusion straight to the cameras.

So from the get-go, what we, we did with the media was tell them this cannot be an accident. Uh this has got to be somebody that wanted to to set somebody up on that set.

That bought two years of the prosecution working to disprove it while attacking Hannah in the same press cycle. It is also the opposite of the case for saying nothing at all in the first days of a case, which is worth watching beside this one. What his investigators found later about the prop master, about rounds thrown away within hours of the shooting, and about who wanted his client fired five days before it, is in the recording, along with what happened when he took it to the district attorney and the sheriff.

Negligence, criminal recklessness, and what the jury instruction left out

The state set out to prove two reckless acts: that Hannah loaded a live round into a firearm that should have held only inert dummies, and that she failed to inspect it before handing the gun to the assistant director in charge of safety. Jason’s read was that this was at most negligent, a civil case. Criminal recklessness in New Mexico requires willfulness, which the law there defines as a conscious disregard for a known risk. That phrase never made it into the instruction the jury took back with them. The defense objected. The jury got the two acts. The distance between a civil case and a felony conviction here is one clause long.

He told us the judge had already denied his motion for a new trial on that instruction, so it goes up on appeal beside the OSHA report the jury was never allowed to read, the one that put the safety failures on the production. If you want to know what those years cost, P.G. Sittenfeld took his own fight over intent through a split verdict, a prison term and a Supreme Court petition. Sentencing was two weeks out when he spoke, no mandatory minimum, a range running from time served to eighteen months, which is the width of gap Doug Passon spent his hour with us teaching people to close.

His own drinking problem, and what it changed about his defense work

He was winning the whole time, and that was the trap. Five years prosecuting on the border, then narcotics, then violent crime, then twenty years of defense work: tax cases of the kind Karen Kelly later described to us from the charging side, and a wire fraud and mail fraud scheme the Northern District of Texas dismissed once his team laid out the facts. Underneath all of it were murder photographs, victims of sexual assault, children of four and five. By 2016 he had a serious problem with alcohol, and he says he kept winning trials right through it. He told us that part because a mother was on the call for a son going into criminal defense.

And the thing that that program and that moment in my life, which was the lowest and was rock bottom, uh became a huge strength for me because it taught me humility again and it taught me, uh getting through something by the grace of God and your family and friends and also it taught me that the focus is on your client.

He had left the United States Attorney’s office because he did not think justice was getting done for individuals, and he told us this case is why he still believes it. Anyone who heard Brian Cuban with us will know the room. He and every expert he called worked it for two years without pay.

About Jason Bowles

Jason has been lead counsel in more than 75 trials in federal, state and military courts, criminal and civil, and has handled more than 40 appeals in New Mexico, Texas and the District of Columbia. He has tried some of the largest cases in his state, including the 2006 prosecution of the New Mexico treasurer. I met Jason working a case in Albuquerque. Walking through the United States Attorney’s office with him on our way to a meeting, people came out of their offices to shake his hand.

This presentation was free, open to all, and held on Zoom on April 2, 2024. It is part of the Tuesday Night Speaker Series hosted by the White Collar Support Group, which meets every Monday evening on Zoom. The series is sponsored by Brent Cassity’s podcast, Nightmare Success.