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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.

Four days later, despite Dunn offering to surrender to the police, at least half a dozen law-enforcement officials in tactical gear staged a nighttime raid on his apartment, bringing him out in handcuffs

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