by Sean Dunn walked up to a line of federal agents at the corner of 14th and U Streets Northwest on the night of August 10, 2025. The agents were Customs and Border Protection officers posted outside a nightclub hosting a Latin Night, part of the federal force surging into Washington that weekend. Dunn shouted at them for the better part of seven minutes. He called them fascists and racists. He chanted “Shame.” “Why are you here?” he shouted. “I don’t want you in my city!” Then he threw his dinner at Agent Gregory Lairmore’s chest. The dinner was a Subway footlong, still in its wrapper. Dunn ran. The agents caught him. A body camera recorded what he said on the sidewalk. “I did it. I threw a sandwich. I did it to draw them away from where they were. I succeeded.”
Dunn worked for the Justice Department. He was a paralegal and international affairs specialist in the criminal division. Attorney General Pam Bondi fired him in a social media post and branded him an example of the Deep State. Armed agents in riot gear later raided his home, and the White House posted a produced video of the raid. Jeanine Pirro, the United States attorney in Washington, announced a felony charge under the statute that punishes forcible assault on a federal officer by up to 8 years in prison. Then her prosecutors carried the case into the grand jury room.
The grand jury said no. The joke, forty years old, had met a footlong. Federal grand juries nearly always say yes. United States attorneys prosecuted about 162,000 federal cases in fiscal 2010, and grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That is one refusal in roughly 14,700 cases. The bureau later stopped publishing the refusal count. The worst year for prosecutors in the last decade of published data was 2007, with 23 refusals against 68,413 criminal cases commenced. Pirro’s office withdrew Dunn’s felony and settled for a misdemeanor.
The hearings kept getting shorter. John Coffee of Columbia Law School mined the Justice Department’s annual reports and found that grand juries averaged 126 minutes per case in 1985. The average fell to 60 minutes by 2000 and 54 minutes by 2009. It slid to 30 minutes by 2011 and 24 minutes by 2018. Coffee then subtracted the hours spent swearing witnesses, reading charges, deliberating, and returning indictments in open court. His arithmetic left perhaps ten minutes of live testimony behind each indictment.
The rules of the grand jury room explain the numbers. A federal grand jury seats 16 to 23 citizens and needs only 12 votes to indict. It meets in secret. It hears the government’s side alone, under evidence rules that admit hearsay no trial jury could hear, a practice the Supreme Court approved in 1956 in Costello v. United States. A prosecutor owes the grand jurors no mention of evidence favorable to the target, the Court held in 1992. The standard is probable cause, a fair probability on which reasonable people act.
Sol Wachtler knew the problem from the inside. He had taken office as chief judge of New York’s highest court in January 1985, the same month he told the New York Daily News that the state should scrap grand jury indictments altogether. District attorneys, he said, now had so much influence over grand juries that “by and large” they could get them to “indict a ham sandwich.” The New York Times, summarizing his argument a month later, said grand juries operate more often as the prosecutor’s pawn than the citizen’s shield. Tom Wolfe, a Washington and Lee classmate of the judge, put the line in The Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987, and it entered the language.
A federal grand jury indicted Wachtler himself seven years later. The charges grew out of his harassment of a former lover, Joy Silverman. He resigned from the bench, pleaded guilty, and served 13 months in federal prison and a halfway house. He had once told an etymologist he regretted the ham, since pastrami made the truer New York sandwich. After prison he told an audience that he had always feared the sandwich line would be the only thing anyone remembered about him. Now, he said, he wished it were.
The grand jury began as an instrument of the crown. Henry II’s Assize of Clarendon in 1166 required twelve lawful men of every hundred and four of every village to name, under oath, the neighbors they suspected of robbery, murder, or theft. The neighbors they named went to the ordeal of water. Across five centuries the panel changed sides. London grand jurors refused to indict the Earl of Shaftesbury for treason in 1681 and wrote “ignoramus” across the bill: we do not know. A crowd in the street roared approval. Two New York grand juries declined to indict the printer John Peter Zenger for seditious libel in 1734. The attorney general charged him anyway, by information, and a trial jury set him free in August 1735. The Fifth Amendment made the shield constitutional text in 1791: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury.”
Modern refusals cluster where the accused wears a badge. The Houston Chronicle found in 2015 that grand juries there had not indicted a city police officer since 2004. Dallas grand juries reviewed 81 police shootings from 2008 through 2012 and indicted one officer. The ham sandwich line got its bitterest workout in the autumn of 2014, when grand juries in Missouri and on Staten Island declined to indict the officers who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The shield had not vanished, the country learned. It had bent toward men in uniform. Every refusal says the same small thing. Twelve citizens in a secret room looked at the government’s case and told it no.
Washington broke that pattern in August 2025. Grand juries in the District refused to indict at least seven times in the first three weeks of the surge, by one count, and three of the refusals landed in a single case. Sidney Reid had filmed an ICE prisoner transfer outside the D.C. Jail in July. Prosecutors said she shoved an FBI agent’s hand into a cement wall hard enough to cut it. The agent’s own text messages labeled the cuts “boo boos” and Reid a “lib tard.” An ICE officer told her during her arrest, “You should have just stayed home and minded your business.” Three grand juries heard the felony case, and three declined it. Prosecutors filed a misdemeanor, produced on the eve of trial two videos the government had said did not exist, and watched a jury acquit Reid on October 16 in under two hours. Grand jurors also refused a felony case against Nathalie Rose Jones, an Indiana woman accused of threatening to kill the president on social media, and a judge dismissed that case outright.
The misdemeanor trial played out over four days in November. Agent Lairmore, a 23-year veteran of Customs and Border Protection, testified that the sandwich struck his ballistic vest hard enough to feel and that it “exploded all over” his uniform. He could smell the onions and the mustard, he said, and an onion string hung from his radio antenna late into the night. The government’s own photograph showed the footlong on the ground, intact in its wrapper. Jurors learned that Lairmore’s colleagues had marked the occasion with gifts, a sandwich-shaped plush toy and a patch that read “Felony Footlong.” Lairmore kept them. The patch went on his lunchbox. The cross-examination drew laughter from the courtroom. Sabrina Shroff, Dunn’s lawyer, told the jury in closing: “A footlong from Subway could not and certainly did not inflict any bodily harm.”
Jonathan Turley called the verdict nullification. The acquittal, the George Washington University law professor wrote that day, “seems more like the result of jury nullification than deliberation.” The elements had all been there. A video shows the throw. Dunn’s own lawyer opened the trial by conceding, “He did it, he threw the sandwich.” The judge called it the simplest case in the world. When twelve citizens acquit on that record, they are voting on something past the evidence. They are voting on the government in their streets. Turley put the objection in its principled form: law enforcement officers, he wrote, are not dunk-tank targets for any citizen with rage issues. He is right about the elements. On the evidence, this was a conviction.
The other reading is older than the republic. The Crown treated what Zenger’s jurors did as lawlessness. Every refusal is a small vote of no confidence, and a republic cannot run on verdicts that ignore evidence. Yet a body that can only say yes adds nothing to prosecution except ceremony. The secrecy that made the room a rubber stamp when prosecutors were trusted also lets it refuse when they are not. Washington’s grand jurors did in August what London’s did in 1681. They looked at the government’s case and declined to put their names on it. Shield and nullification are one act, performed in one room. We name it afterward, by whether we like the defendant it covers.
Pirro blamed the jurors. Grand jurors, she said on Fox News, live in Georgetown or “in some of these better areas,” so “they don’t see the reality of crime.” A prosecutor who cannot persuade twelve randomly drawn neighbors has lost something no charging mill can replace. The city answered her all autumn. Banksy-style portraits of the thrower went up on restaurant walls. Halloween skeletons held footlongs in their bony hands. The trial jury, which ate sandwiches at lunch on its last day, deliberated about seven hours before acquitting Dunn on November 6. Dunn hugged his lawyers when the foreperson read the verdict. Outside, he said he had been trying that night to protect the rights of immigrants. “Every life matters,” he said, “no matter where you came from.” Pirro’s office closed the case with a statement that law enforcement should never face assault, no matter how minor, and that even children know they may not throw things when angry.
The footlong survived the night intact. In the government’s evidence photo it lies on the pavement, still in its wrapper, undamaged by the explosion the agent described. The sandwich held together. The felony did not. Wachtler’s joke outlived its teller because the numbers kept proving it. Washington’s grand jurors spent one August proving that the room can still refuse. The question they left standing is the one the joke always carried inside it. What is a grand jury for, if it never says no?
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