Professor Tamara Lave discussed the trial and conviction of the on-set armorer, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, on the movie Rust. She was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for the 2021 on-set fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and was sentenced by a New Mexico judge to 18 months in prison. Listen to Season 12, Episode 11 of the Explainer Podcast.
After graduating from Stanford Law School, Lave was a deputy public defender for ten years in San Diego, California. As a P.D., she handled a variety of cases including possession of a spiny lobster out of season, torture, child molestation, rape, and murder. She also represented accused sexually violent predators in civil commitment hearings. Early in her career, Lave published a My Turn column in Newsweek magazine about being a beginning public defender.
At Miami Law, Lave teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, criminal procedure adjudication, and evidence. Her primary areas of research are campus sexual misconduct, the punishment and control of sex offenders, and more recently, policing. Lave is involved in two major interdisciplinary research projects. She is a studying facial recognition technology pursuant to a ULINK Social Equity Challenge Grant. She is also working with researchers at UCLA to study the impact of the sex offender registry on LGBT registrants.
