“You could smell the onions and the mustard.”
“You could smell the onions and the mustard.”
WASHINGTON Hurling a sandwich at a federal agent was an act of protest for Washington, D.C., resident Sean Charles Dunn. A jury must decide if it was also a federal crime.
“No matter who you are, you can’t just go around throwing stuff at people because you’re mad,” Assistant U.S. Attorney John Parron told jurors on Tuesday at the start of Dunn’s trial on a misdemeanor assault charge.
Dunn doesn’t dispute that he threw his submarine-style sandwich at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent outside a nightclub on the night of Aug. 10. It was an “exclamation point” for Dunn as he expressed his opposition to President Donald Trump’s law-enforcement surge in the nation’s capital, defense attorney Julia Gatto said during the trial’s opening statements.
“It was a harmless gesture at the end of him exercising his right to speak out,” Gatto said. “He is overwhelmingly not guilty.”
A bystander’s cellphone video of the confrontation went viral on social media, turning Dunn into a symbol of resistance against Trump’s monthslong federal takeover. Murals depicting him mid-throw popped up in the city virtually overnight.
“He did it. He threw the sandwich,” Gatto told jurors. “And now the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia has turned that moment — a thrown sandwich — into a criminal case, a federal criminal case charging a federal offense.
