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.”
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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.

Of course, motivation is important and the jurors debated that as well. The defendant is the best person to explain motivation but in some cases, the lawyers for the defendant recommend that they not testify so as to prevent them being subjected to cross-examination by the prosecution in ways that might harm their case. The benefit of testifying is that giving their motivations might make them sympathetic to the jurors. In this case Dunn did not testify but his lawyers were able to introduce his motivations, though that was not widely reported in the media.

The jurors also debated Dunn’s motivation in transforming his turkey sub into a projectile. Was he just an overgrown toddler, having a tantrum? Would it have been different, they wondered, had he flung a rock, rather than deli meat on a soft baguette? Was this free speech or assault? Did it matter if his goal was to protect a vulnerable community?

Dunn’s lawyers presented a version of this explanation in court: Dunn said he had seen the officers standing outside a gay club, Bunker, that was hosting a “Latin Night.” He worried they were about to stage an immigration raid, so he got in their faces, calling them “racists” and “fascists” and repeatedly bellowing: “SHAME! SHAME!” His goal had been to draw them away from the club. (“I succeeded,” Dunn said, referring to the officers who left their perch in front of the club to swarm him as he ran away.)
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Still, the juror I spoke with said that as she learned more about the case, she had come to view Dunn with complicated admiration. “If he was trying to lure law enforcement away from innocent people, I think he’s a hero. He was trying to do the right thing, and he was getting very, very angry and frustrated, and I think a lot of people can relate to that,” she said. “He’s an unlikely hero, maybe, but he stood up for his beliefs, and I respect that.”

When juries acquit or nullify, it is almost always because they think that the accused acted from good motives, which is why the prosecution tries to prevent the defense from providing motivation without actually testifying.

It was clear from the get-go to the jurors that this was a case that should never have been brought at all.

Interesting legal questions aside, the trial took on a dadaist sheen, befitting the act itself. The juror told me that she and her fellow jurors used words like absurd, laughable, and waste of government money. “We’re supposed to be looking at the evidence, but a clear majority felt it was nonsensical, like Don’t waste our time or money,” she said.

So why did the jury deliberations spill over into a second day? Because they wanted to do the right thing.

“We probably could have gotten the thing resolved on the first day, but there were two holdouts, and we really didn’t want to steamroll them,” she said. “We wanted them to come to the conclusions on their own and see if they could be convinced to switch their position based on the facts and evidence.”

Some people are cynical about jury trials, seeing ordinary people as not competent enough to think things through. I am not one of them. When you put a dozen ordinary people together to decide a case, they tend to take their role seriously. They are also more likely than a judge to view sympathetically the plight of someone like them who has been unfairly targeted by law enforcement (as this case clearly was) even if the person actually did do what they were accused of.