Tonight in Your Rights: Sandwich-thrower case tossed

Another jury finds a Trump DOJ case sub-par, and the Supreme Court undermines trans rights on the shadow docket.

The case of accused D.C. sandwich thrower mythologized in Banksy-style street art. (Photo by Tom Brenner for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Comprehensive, concise, context and clarity.

Another case by former Fox personality turned U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro just couldn’t cut the mustard.

A jury acquitted accused sandwich thrower Sean Dunn on Thursday, following a trial on allegations that he assaulted federal law enforcement with a hoagie. Prosecutors initially tried to charge Dunn with a felony, but they reduced the count to a misdemeanor after failing to persuade a grand jury to indict.

The case follows a nationwide pattern of federal prosecutors failing to convict, or even indict, defendants accused of resisting, impeding or assaulting law enforcement. There have been several such cases in Washington, D.C., dozens in Los Angeles, and a smattering of others in different jurisdictions.

Before Donald Trump’s second term, it was extraordinarily rare for grand juries to decline to indict a case. Federal court acquittals are also typically uncommon in the United States.

In Dunn’s case, footage of the defendant’s interactions with law enforcement quickly went viral.

An FBI affidavit quoted Dunn yelling at federal law enforcement, “F*** you! You f***ing fascists! Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city.” His lawyer Julia Gatto reportedly acknowledged to the jury: “He did it, he threw the sandwich,” describing it as a “harmless gesture that did not, could not, cause injury.”

Co-counsel Sabrina Schroff said the sandwich was not “forcible,” according to CBS News.

Trans rights weakened on shadow docket

The Supreme Court paused an order blocking the Trump administration from forcing transgender people to list the gender assigned to them at birth on their passports.

“Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth—in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment,” the conservative majority wrote in an unsigned opinion.

In a dissent co-signed by all Democratic-appointed peers, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson classified the shadow docket ruling as part of a pattern of the Court’s conservatives quickly granting Trump what he wants before a case can be fully briefed.

“As is becoming routine, the Government seeks an emergency stay of a District Court’s preliminary injunction pending appeal,” Jackson wrote. “As is also becoming routine, this Court misunderstands the assignment.”

“Our task in deciding stay applications is not simply to make a ‘back-of-the-napkin assessment of which party has the better legal argument,’” she continued. “Rather, the actual nub of the project (if we choose to involve ourselves in the matter at all) is to fairly determine whether the applicant’s showing justifies our extraordinary intervention.”

Jackson noted that Trump’s policy goes against 33 years of practice against six presidential administrations.

“No matter,” she wrote. “On January 22, 2025, the agency overhauled the rules for sex markers on passports, reverting to its pre-1992 practices. Its Passport Policy now requires that all new passports reflect the holders’ sex assigned at birth.”

To obtain immediate relief from the Supreme Court, the justices had to find that the government would experience “irreparable harm” from delayed implementation of its policy change.

Jackson wondered what harm to the government “might possibly be.”

“All the Government is able to muster is the statement that ‘the injunction forces the government to misrepresent the sex of passport holders to foreign nations’ and to ‘contradict . . . biological reality,’” the dissent states. “But how urgent can this interest be when the Passport Policy itself allows transgender Americans who already have passports with sex markers reflecting their current gender identity to continue using those passports until they expire?”

The harm for transgender people was more straightforward.

“Airport checkpoints are stressful and invasive for travelers under typical circumstances—even without the added friction of being forced to present government-issued identification documents that do not reflect one’s identity,” Jackson wrote. “Thus, by preventing transgender Americans from obtaining gender-congruent passports, the Government is doing more than just making a statement about its belief that transgender identity is ‘false.’ The passport policy also invites the probing, and at times humiliating, additional scrutiny these plaintiffs have experienced.”

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the dissent.

Read the ruling and dissents in full here.