The actor wouldn't. The producer who let live ammo anywhere near a set would.
He's being charged as the head of production, not as the actor who was unfortunate enough to pull the trigger. The fact that he's both is just a cruel twist of fate.
According to CNN [1] this is not true. Baldwin is facing charges for his direct actions as an actor (who pulled the trigger) and as the producer. I imagine this will be very confusing for a jury to unpack, and I think it’s unfortunate. To quote the DA:
Other actors — including "A-list" celebrities — consulted by prosecutors said they "always check their guns or have someone check it in front of them," Carmack-Altwies told CNN shortly after announcing her intention to file involuntary manslaughter charges. Every person that handles a gun has a duty to make sure that if they're going to handle that gun, point it at someone and pull the trigger, that it is not going to fire a projectile and kill someone," she said. She added, "An actor does not get a free pass just because they are an actor. That is what is so important. We are saying here in New Mexico, that everyone is equal under the law."
The piece goes on to note that the “criminal liability as a producer” case would have different requirements than the “criminal liability as an actor” case, presumably because one case would need to argue that on-set safety was actually Baldwin’s responsibility and he was specifically negligent in that duty. But based on the DA’s quotes it looks like she is going for a very broad theory of liability that mixes the two roles up (ie as the producer he should have known to take special care when handed a cold gun as an actor.) It says that CNN’s legal expert found the case to be very unusual, FWIW. I’ll be honest that this case has a whiff of “small town DA wanting to get a bigger political profile” to it, but I guess we’ll see.
This may be that the prosecutor thinks they have a case for producers, and then piled speculative charges in top for intimidation. Or, in this specific case where actor Baldwin knew the selfsame producer Baldwin was negligent regarding safety, he shouldn't have known better. A different actor who was not also producer might not have caught a charge.
Gun safety etiquette dictates that the handler is always responsible for their own ammo. Alec the actor should definitely not get a free pass. I didn't realize there were criminal ramifications too.
Alec the producer is guilty of a far worse crime IMO. It could have easily been someone else who pulled the trigger.
Standard gun safety procedures are excellent, but don’t really have any bearing here. Just as a professional chemical laboratory has different safety procedures (and responsibilities/expectations for workers) than, say, your house: a film set also has different expectations and safety procedures when it comes to weapons.
I’m no expert, but my understanding is that film sets need to allow actors to use guns in specific ways that would never be acceptable in normal gun ownership, such as to point (“cold”) props at people and pull the trigger. To enable this specialized usage the industry has developed a very specific set of safety standards tailored to this use-case. It involves hiring specially-trained professional armorers to manage all of the prop weapons on the set, and it also puts in place a new set of communication procedures to ensure that armorers can communicate with actors to let them know when they’re dealing with an unsafe weapon. From what I can tell, Baldwin the actor followed these safety procedures exactly as expected.
There is a separate question of whether Baldwin the executive producer has liability. To answer that you can’t just say “but he has a producer credit!” You’d need to actually show that (1) he had responsibility over hiring or on-set safety, and separately that (2) in that role he was negligent. It’s not really clear that an executive producer has that responsibility, usually it’s just a meaningless vanity credit.
What’s confusing about this case (from what I can tell) is that the DA realizes that both of these individual cases is kind of weak. And so instead she’s going for a hybrid case where Baldwin the actor followed the normal safety standards, but this isn’t sufficient because he somehow has to follow a non-standard (higher) set of safety standards because “as the producer he should have been aware that the professional armorer wasn’t trustworthy.” I’m not saying this argument is wrong, exactly. But I think it’s vague enough that it might allow a jury to disregard the legal safety requirements and invent new ones out of whole cloth.
PS I find this case fascinating and I don’t apologize for it! But I do apologize for the long post.
"cruel twist of fate." no Alec Baldwin was not responsible as both a producer and actor, now he is being held accountable as he was in every sense of the word responsible for manslaughter...even involuntarily.
Cruelty is reserved for the grief of the individual who had their life abruptly ended, and the grief of family of the deceased.
He's being charged as the head of production, not as the actor who was unfortunate enough to pull the trigger. The fact that he's both is just a cruel twist of fate.