The brief federal criminal trial last month of Sean Dunn, the man who threw a "submarine-style sandwich" at a Customs and Border Protection officer in downtown Washington, D.C., was only a misdemeanor case. But the courtroom was filled, and the overflow room was crowded, too.
The 12 jurors didn't realize initially that Dunn's case — and their verdict — would garner national attention.
One juror thought the deliberations would last under an hour. The juror, a longtime resident of Washington, D.C., also noted that some people in the courtroom struggled to "keep a straight face" during the trial and even laughed openly.
"It seemed to me like an open and closed type of thing," another juror said. "It was kind of ridiculous."
Dunn hurled the sandwich at the CBP officer stationed at a busy intersection in August. The incident was widely publicized and quickly became a symbol of resistance against President Trump's federal policing crackdown and National Guard deployment in the nation's capital.
After roughly seven hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted Dunn. It was the second time a group of D.C. citizens rejected the Justice Department's claim that Dunn, who was fired from his job at the Justice Department after the incident, had committed a crime in tossing a sandwich at a federal agent. A separate grand jury had rejected the prosecutors' request to indict Dunn on a felony charge earlier this year.
Inside the jury room
Three jurors who sat on the panel spoke with CBS News about the deliberations, revealing how the politically charged case played out behind closed doors in the jury room of the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., near the U.S. Capitol.
All asked to remain anonymous. A court order from the chief judge of the D.C. U.S. District Court prohibits CBS News and other media outlets from publishing the jurors' names.
The jurors described an initial 10-2 split on the 12-person panel. The deliberations were not as simple as some of them had expected.
The majority of jurors thought the incident did not merit criminal charges, or that criminal intent was not proven, according to two of the members of the panel. One juror told CBS News, "I thought we'd be out of there quickly. This case had no 'grounding.' He threw a sandwich at the agent because he knew it wouldn't hurt. A reasonable person wouldn't think a sandwich is a weapon."
A second juror, who told CBS News this was not her first time serving on a D.C. jury, said the panel eventually "agreed that this is not and should not have been a federal case."
The jurors said the two initial holdouts worried that a not guilty verdict would send a message that it's sometimes acceptable to throw things at federal agents.
The two jurors told CBS News that the jury debated at length about the type of "criminal intent" that needed to have been demonstrated by prosecutors.
One juror said, "We asked each other: If we only look at this case, can someone really do harm to someone wearing a ballistic vest by throwing a sandwich?"
One of the jurors also credited the "gentle and patient" foreperson with coming up with a productive communications strategy during deliberations.
A juror who spoke with CBS News by phone was surprised to be assigned to the case, because the juror had heard about the prior rejection by a grand jury of Sean Dunn's felony case.
"I was surprised some of the other jurors were unfamiliar with it," the juror said, noting the headlines generated by Dunn's arrest and the video of the sandwich toss in August.
Though the case was a misdemeanor, without the prospect of a lengthy prison term for conviction, one juror said she noticed an unusual tension in the proceedings at trial.
"There seemed to be a lot of back and forth between lawyers and the judge to begin with. I've been on a jury before, and that hasn't happened," she said. "So, that kind of stood out to me."
The notoriety of Dunn's case and the political tensions surrounding the Trump administration's deployment of federal agents on the streets in D.C., added a unique stress on the jurors. Three told CBS News they're worried about being publicly identified and facing the prospect of threats or harassment.
"We were very scared and nervous about what this meant for us," one juror said.
The same juror, who was familiar with the case before she was selected, said she thought Dunn looked "really sad and desperate at the defense table because he was going up against the U.S. government."
One juror noted one witness and some attorneys in the room appeared to "giggle" or fight to keep a "straight face" during some of the testimony.
"I mean," the juror said, "it was a thrown sandwich."
