LGBTQ Rights

Inside the Sandwich Guy’s Jury Deliberations
www.yahoo.com/news/article…

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— tommyboy0690.bsky.social (@tommyboy0690.bsky.social) November 12, 2025 at 4:58 PM

Mostly posting this because I’d seen rumors about Dunn’s motivation, but no actual reporting (per the paragraph I’ve highlighted in the extract below.) Ashley Parker, for the Atlantic [gift link]:

The jurors in the case of The United States of America v. The Sandwich Guy (as Sean Charles Dunn is better known) sized one another up before the final group had even been selected, asking, “Did you attend the ‘No Kings’ march?”

“It’s like, You’re damn right I went,” one juror told me, referring to the anti-Trump protests throughout the country last month, including in Washington, D.C. (The juror, who spoke with me several days after she and 11 of her peers found Dunn not guilty of assault, did so anonymously because, as she explained, Donald Trump’s administration is “very vengeful,” and she fears retribution.)

The facts of the incident are ostensibly simple: In the early days of Trump’s militarization of the nation’s capital, Dunn—a 37-year-old Air Force veteran and, at the time, Justice Department employee—screamed at federal officers stationed in a popular nightlife corridor, repeatedly calling them fascists, and then hurled a Subway footlong at a Customs and Border Protection agent, hitting him squarely in the chest. “I did it. I threw a sandwich,” Dunn confessed to law enforcement upon being apprehended—a sort of modern Williams Carlos Williams (“I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox …”) for the more carnivorous, angrier set. Although it was widely reported at the time that the sandwich was salami, Dunn later said it was turkey…

Like nearly everything involving Trump, the episode became polarizing, absurdist, stripped of nuance—a Rorschach test for both one’s politics and one’s life experience. (As someone who in my early 30s lived just off the nightlife corridor near 14th and U Streets where the hoagie histrionics occurred, I initially assumed: Drunk dude, egged on by drunk people, does drunk thing.)

And so, in an escapade to which everyone brought a deeply personal perspective—the government that dubbed Dunn an “example of the Deep State”; the D.C. residents who turned him into a Resistance folk hero memorialized in street art and Halloween costumes; the sandwich thrower himself, whose lawyers portrayed him as unfairly targeted by the Trump administration—the 12 jurors found themselves simply trying to do their jobs, as fairly and impartially as possible.

The juror I spoke with told me that the jury—three men and nine women (roughly an equal mix of Black and white)—included an architect, a professor, an analyst, and some retirees whom she described as probably “100 percent anti-Trump” and protective of their city. She went into the trial thinking it was “bullshit,” she told me, “but I did enter it trying to be objective.”…

The group was careful to avoid politics, she said, and instead focused on several key questions: Had the sandwich actually “exploded all over” CBP agent Gregory Lairmore, as he’d testified? (Specifically, they analyzed—and at times mocked—Lairmore’s claim that “I had mustard and condiments on my uniform, and an onion hanging from my radio antenna that night.”) What was Dunn’s intent in flinging the grinder? And what actually constitutes “bodily harm”?

On the first question, several jury members struggled to stifle laughter as Lairmore expanded on the hoagie’s alleged explosive properties. “It was like, Oh, you poor baby,” the juror told me. But the group observed that photos of the sandwich at the scene showed it fully intact, still in its Subway wrapper. “So how did it explode?” the juror wondered. She said they also discussed the fact that law enforcement had not retrieved or bagged the sandwich as evidence, the way they would have done with an actual weapon, like a gun.

The jurors also debated Dunn’s motivation in transforming his turkey sub into a projectile. Was he just an overgrown toddler, having a tantrum? Would it have been different, they wondered, had he flung a rock, rather than deli meat on a soft baguette? Was this free speech or assault? Did it matter if his goal was to protect a vulnerable community?

Dunn’s lawyers presented a version of this explanation in court: Dunn said he had seen the officers standing outside a gay club, Bunker, that was hosting a “Latin Night.” He worried they were about to stage an immigration raid, so he got in their faces, calling them “racists” and “fascists” and repeatedly bellowing: “SHAME! SHAME!” His goal had been to draw them away from the club. (“I succeeded,” Dunn said, referring to the officers who left their perch in front of the club to swarm him as he ran away.) And the defense had likened Dunn’s act to a harmless “punctuation,” an “exclamation mark at the end of a verbal outburst”—an argument the juror told me that several of her peers found resonant.

But the biggest sticking point was whether Dunn had caused bodily harm. At one point, the jury sent a note, asking how “injury” is different from “bodily harm.” “The definition of injury isn’t just bodily harm—it’s offensive touch—and we struggled with that because we all said we’d be offended if a sandwich hit us, but then this agent was standing with about 14 other agents on the corner of 14th and U, all kitted out,” the juror told me…

Interesting Read: <em>Inside the Sandwich Guy’s Jury Deliberations</em>Post + Comments (104)