There was no dispute from anyone in a federal district courtroom on Tuesday that on one evening in August, Sean C. Dunn pelted a Customs and Border Protection agent with a freshly made deli sandwich after confronting a group of officers patrolling a popular bar district in Washington.
There was considerable dispute, however, over whether the act should be treated as a criminal offense.
The trial Mr. Dunn faced in Washington was the product of a monthslong effort to exact some — or any — penalty against him, after the Trump administration tried and failed to secure a felony indictment against Mr. Dunn in August. Online and in local culture, the Subway-brand sandwich and Mr. Dunn’s chucking of it, which was captured on video that went viral, have became symbols of resistance to President Trump’s militarized law enforcement sweeps in Washington that have regularly recurred since August.
But Department of Justice prosecutors tried again, charging Mr. Dunn, a former paralegal at the department, with misdemeanor assault, and on Tuesday, they tried to persuade a jury of Washington residents to convict.
Lawyers delivered opening statements and began presenting testimony in a trial scheduled to last only a day or two.
For much of the morning, jurors heard the lawyers cite principles more commonly heard in kindergartens than in law schools.
“No matter who you are, you can’t just go around throwing stuff at people because you’re mad,” John Parron, a government lawyer, said during his opening statement.
“That’s something you just can’t do,” he emphasized. Mr. Parron argued the food fight did indeed amount to interfering with law enforcement and was not an expression of Mr. Dunn’s First Amendment rights. Mr. Dunn took off running right after lobbing the sandwich, Mr. Parron said, showing that he knew “he had crossed a line.”
A lawyer for Mr. Dunn countered that the prosecution was a performative escalation of a “harmless gesture that did not and could not cause harm or injury.”
“He did it, he threw the sandwich,” the defense lawyer, Julia Gatto, told jurors in an opening statement. But she added: “You’re not going to be asked if you feel bad for the agent who took a sandwich to the chest. You’re going to be asked whether what happened that night is a federal crime.”
The government started its presentation with testimony from Gregory Lairmore, the agent on the receiving end of the roll, who described his work that night as “high-visibility crime prevention and enforcement.”
Mr. Lairmore testified that as a specialist in information systems who had worked for Customs and Border Protection for 23 years it was unusual for him to be deployed in the field at night. But he was sent out on patrols in Washington after Mr. Trump signed an executive order in August declaring a “crime emergency” in the city. The president has used the order to blanket Washington with over 2,000 National Guard members and hundreds of federal law enforcement agents like Mr. Lairmore.
He said he was out on patrol with around 10 other agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and officers from the Metro Transit Police Department. Mr. Lairmore said he was testing an “Android team awareness kit,” which shares the location of law enforcement agents with one another during a deployment, when the group encountered Mr. Dunn.
He recalled Mr. Dunn approaching him at the corner of U Street and 14th Street in Northwest Washington, and described Mr. Dunn’s demeanor shifting to “hyper-negative, red-faced, enraged.” Mr. Dunn, he said, delivered a screed “almost like a sermon,” that included calling him and other agents “fascists.”
Then Mr. Lairmore recounted the moment of impact.
“I could feel it through my ballistic vest,” he said. He recalled that “it kind of exploded all over” and that he “smelled the onions and the mustard” as the roll came apart.
Sabrina Shroff, another lawyer representing Mr. Dunn, pressed Mr. Lairmore on whether the run-in with Mr. Dunn amounted to anything more than a momentary annoyance. She asked Mr. Lairmore about “gag gifts” he has since received at work, including a “plush sandwich” toy that he testified he placed on his desk and a patch reading “felony footlong” that he had also put on display, suggesting even his colleagues saw the incident as a joke.
The government also called on Tuesday Daina Henry, a Metropolitan Transit Police detective whose body camera captured Mr. Dunn fleeing after the sandwich throw.
Lawyers on both sides told jurors they should have a quick journey to a simple verdict.
“This case isn’t going to test your ability to wade through a thicket of complex evidence,” Mr. Parron said.
Mr. Dunn’s lawyers said he held strong convictions that the president’s immigration policy was “racist” and that “the militarization and takeover of law enforcement in Washington is fascism.” They said that while expressing those views in a moment of passion, he wound up and let the sub go as a final political statement.
“It is a punctuation,” Ms. Gatto said. “It is an exclamation mark at the end of a verbal outburst.”
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the federal courts, including the legal disputes over the Trump administration’s agenda.
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