Man who threw sandwich at US border agent not guilty of assault
43 comments
·November 6, 2025floren
tdb7893
People shouldn't be throwing sandwiches at people but it's wild in the US that the most minor stuff against the police and they try to charge you with a felony but police can commit pretty much any form of assault (even on camera) and often don't even lose their job unless there's a big outcry.
adrr
Law enforcement officer committed perjury on the stand since the defense presented a picture of the sandwich after the throw and it was still wrapped up. It never exploded.
jojobas
An attack on a cop is an attack on the state. You sure have a right to revolution but you better succeed, cause state has the right to imprison you.
jahsome
Even with an outcry, the blue wall often protects them only until it's politically untenable.
dktalks
I was in a grand jury recently and a cop/attorney came to the supreme court of our state with a terroristic threat from a homeless person in a park who made a gun sign and said pow pow, and they wanted us to indict them....
By this standard most of the sports player in the nation should be indicted.
Good news we unanimously rejected it
yndoendo
They never took photo evidence of the scene and the only captured content was from a 3rd party showing the Subway sandwich wrapped up, lying on the street.
I would say Gregory Lairmore is a po' boy full of shit.
natebc
> a po' boy full of shit
Now that's a sandwich-in-the-face worthy of getting worked up about!
spl757
"The Perjury": 10lbs of shit on a 5lb bun tossed with onions and mustard.
edit: one too many words
pxc
Wow. So they even lied about the details of how the sandwich hit them.
ethin
These people will literally claim that just bumping into them is "assault". Where do you think they're getting the "1000 percent increase" stats from? (For those who aren't aware, what the DHS is really trying to say is "well ,before all this started, there were just 10 assaults per year on ICE officers and now there's 100".)
amarant
It's a veritable smorgasbord of trauma!
pxc
This reads so much like The Onion, it's uncanny.
gamblor956
He must have had very sensitive skin to feel a sandwich through a ballistic vest.
mmooss
Per the NY Times, the jury deliberated for 7 hours. That seems like quite a long time for a simple case. I wonder what the hold-up was. They add,
"The jury determined that the launching of the 12-inch deli sandwich ... was not an attempt to cause bodily injury, preventing a conviction."
It seems like that couldn't have taken seven hours by itself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/us/politics/trump-sandwic...
analog31
It could easily take 7 hours to determine, empirically and with good statistics, if a sandwich could cause bodily injury.
wat10000
I’d guess there were some “law and order” types on the jury and it took a while to convince them to acquit.
tptacek
This is the good outcome; one note I had about this though is, per CNN:
In one video taken from a police officer’s body-worn
camera, Dunn told the officer, “I was trying to draw
them away from where they were. I succeeded.”
mmooss
Yeah, I was surprised he said that. And he worked at the time for the Department of Justice criminal division.
It almost sounded like a post hoc rationalization, to make an outburt sound clever and intentional. Likely a stressful situtation to put yourself in.
SpicyLemonZest
Like all civil disobedience, it occupies an awkward middle ground. You don't necessarily want to make prosecutors' lives easier, but your protest is a lot more powerful if you make it clear to the world that you really did violate the law, because then anyone who supports you has to acknowledge that the law is unfair.
throw0101a
While the old saying that a good DA/prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich[0][1][2][3] may still be true, conviction is another matter. Which is, in all of this, probably the coldest cut of all.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/indict_a_ham_sandwich
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Wachtler
[2] https://history.nycourts.gov/biography/sol-wachtler/
[3] https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/a-grand-jury-would-indict-...
atmavatar
Where has all the prosciutto gone
And where's the kosher salt?
Where's the fine-chopped rosemary leaves
to be a flavor catapult?
---
Isn't there some olive oil and sliced provolone cheese?
Slice up a large tomato
And a bell pepper that's been peeled
---
I need a hero, I'm holding out for a hero to snack on at night
It's gotta be long, and it's gotta be fast, and it's gotta be freshly on-site
CGMthrowaway
A nice affirmation of jury nullification - one of the last freedoms left in this country.
dannyobrien
More info on jury nullification -- and how you can be prepared when asked to judge your peers: https://fija.org/
(For those outside the US: being called to serve on a jury is a surprisingly frequent event for Americans, and can be very powerful civil act, though a time-consuming and costly one).
mmooss
Was it nullification? Maybe it didn't meet the standard of guilt.
The jury determined that the launching of the 12-inch deli sandwich from what the government described as “point-blank range” was not an attempt to cause bodily injury, preventing a conviction.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/us/politics/trump-sandwic...
foxglacier
It seems like a double standard. If you approached a random member of the public that you didn't like the look of, shouted at them that you don't want them in your city and violently threw a soft object at them, you could easily be convicted of assault and receive some minor punishment. I think most people would accept that you should be. Should people have greater rights to assault policemen than other types of people? Or should assault be legal if the victim's workmates find it funny?
sys32768
The assault claim didn't cut the mustard, leaving a stain on the agency's reputation.
null
lapetitejort
A hero strikes a zero.
gdulli
The real crime is that the sandwich was probably like $16.
mickle00
It was all bologna
reaperducer
Man who threw sandwich at US border agent not guilty of assault
…by twelve hangry men.
(Stolen from Fark)
> The jury's verdict comes after Customs and Border Patrol agent Gregory Lairmore testified that the snack "exploded all over him" and he "could smell the onions and mustard" on his uniform. [...] "I could feel it through my ballistic vest," he said of the sandwich's impact, adding that an onion string hung from his police radio and mustard stained his shirt.
God, how horrifying. Maybe with time and intensive therapy he'll eventually be able to heal.