It is often interesting when, after a trial that garnered a lot of attention, the jurors talk about what went on in the jury room. That is what happened when a juror spoke to Ashley Parker, a reporter from The Atlantic magazine, about the case in which Sean Charles Dunn, aka the Sandwich Guy, was on trial for throwing a sandwich at a CBP agent. She said that she wished to be anonymous because of the reputation of the Trump people to be vindictive and seek to retaliate.
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.