When it comes to making predictions, sometimes it’s fun to be right – sometimes it’s not.

Readers of SN&R’s weekly newsletter will recall that, back in January, I predicted that the manslaughter case against Alec Baldwin would be a disaster for New Mexico prosecutors and ultimately lead to the actor being acquitted in a jury trial. Well, the case against Baldwin didn’t even get that far. As soon as the original special prosecutor behind the indictment, Andrea Reeb, essentially acknowledged that her involvement in bringing the case was constitutionally illegal (she’s a sitting Republican member of the state assembly) court-watchers began to get a sense of the kind of political skullduggery that was driving the entire legal saga.

There’s a reason that elected officials in one branch of government aren’t allowed to temporarily double-dip into the role of elected officials from another branch, especially when it comes to engaging in criminal prosecutions of high-profile individuals. That should be doubly true if it involves prosecuting a famous person, such as Baldwin, who happens to encapsulate the opposite politics as the elected official in question. The fact that Reeb even attempted to get away with this in court – for weeks and weeks – before Baldwin’s attorneys brought reality crashing down on her, speaks to the willful abandonment of rules and norms that’s so common with American elites these days.

Reeb being forced off the case meant that more sober-eyed professional prosecutors had to evaluate whether there was genuine evidence to charge Baldwin for the accidental shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. A few weeks ago, those attorneys came to a similar assessment as the one that was earlier suggested in this newsletter – that the case against Baldwin was a soft sack of Saint Bernard shit. All charges against him were dropped before there was even a preliminary hearing.

Of course, there’s no cause for gloating among the many legal writers who foresaw this: At the end of the day, a young mother lost her life because of cascading negligence on a film set. We can only hope that Hollywood’ has taken some safety lessons from the incident. And that grand-standing politicians think twice before playing games with the court system.