A D.C. jury showed no appetite for the Trump administration’s case against a man who threw a salami sandwich at a federal agent earlier this year, acquitting the 37-year-old after seven hours of deliberation.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office said Sean Dunn, an Air Force veteran, was not on trial for protesting but for “throwing a sandwich at a federal officer at point-blank range.”
After deliberations stretched into a second day, a trial jury dismissed the government’s misdemeanor charge, which they earlier agreed to downgrade from a felony.
Attorneys for Dunn described the throwing of the sandwich as “a harmless gesture” and argued the case was “a blatant abuse of power” that came with “a choreographed, militarized raid on his small apartment” and the threat of jail time.
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“Sean Dunn expressed his opinions,” Julia Gatto, one of Dunn’s defense attorneys, said in Tuesday’s opening statement. “He expressed them loudly, and he expressed them maybe you think vulgarly, but he expressed his opinions. But words without force are never assault.”
“In this country, the last time I checked, dissent and opposition are not crimes,” she said.
According to court filings, on Aug. 10 Dunn approached federal officers who were assigned to patrol the northwest D.C. area of 14th and U Streets. He is seen in video footage calling the officers fascists and telling them to leave the city before chucking a sandwich — which he later revealed had salami and mustard on it — at a Customs and Border Protection agent.
“No matter who you are, you can’t just go around throwing stuff at people ‘cause you’re mad,” prosecutor John Parron said in his opening statement. “You can’t do it with your neighbor. You can’t do it with federal law enforcement.”
The agent on the receiving end of the sandwich, Gregory Lairmore, was one of two witnesses called by the prosecution. He testified that he felt the sandwich make impact through his full body armor and bullet proof vest.
“The sandwich kind of exploded all over my uniform,” Lairmore testified Tuesday. “It smelled of onions and mustard.”
Dunn’s acquittal marks at least the fourth time that the federal government has failed to convince D.C. citizens to go along with its arguments since President Donald Trump returned to office in January.
Last month, jurors in the same courthouse voted three times against convicting Sydney Reid of the same misdemeanor charge of assaulting a federal officer. Reid, a D.C. resident, was protesting the Trump administration’s immigration policies at the D.C. jail when an FBI agent scraped her hand on a wall while detaining her. Prosecutors argued that though she did not actually make contact with the officer, her knee came close to his groin during the scuffle — and that movement constituted “assault.”
Pirro in August announced that her office would be seeking the maximum penalties for those arrested as part of Trump’s “crackdown on crime” in D.C.
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