You think a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich? Baloney! Here’s reason to hope Anglo-American law can survive Trump

NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised [unlawfully dispossessed] of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right. — Magna Carta, 1215, as amended in 1297 (25 Edward 1).

I’m feeling a little better about the Trump regime’s made-for-TV paramilitary occupation of Los Angeles and Washington, DC, thanks to King John I of England, his rebellious barons and a US Department of Justice lawyer who threw a Subway sandwich at a federal agent in an upscale Washington nightclub district 810 years after the barons forced John to issue Magna Carta in 1215.

The lawyer is Sean Charles Dunn, 35, who was immediately fired from his job in President Trump’s DOJ. In a heated exchange with US Customs and Border Patrol agents the night of Aug. 10, he threw a deli sandwich at the feds. Trump’s newly appointed US attorney, former Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro, filed felony charges against him. Under federal case law, felony assault includes assault with a deadly weapon and/or intent to do bodily harm.

“We’re gonna back the police to the hilt,” Pirro said in a prerecorded video. “So there; stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else.”

But a grand jury in effect told Pirro where to stick her felony charges.

After hearing whatever evidence she had to offer, they refused to return an indictment on the federal felony assault charges. More approprate misdemeanor charges stemming from the same incident are pending in October.

Which gives me hope!

I’m not a lawyer, but my doctoral dissertation was on what we now call the rule of law in Shakespeare’s history plays. And, later, as a police beat reporter covering criminal courts in several jurisdictions, I got a decidedly unacademic understanding of how the Anglo-American system of law actually works. All of which makes me think that jury in Washington did exactly what juries, one way or another, have been empaneled to do since Magna Carta.

In a word, juries give real people the chance to apply their real -world experience to the prosecution’s theory of the case. We’ll get back to that in a minute.

Certainly that’s how it worked in Dunn’s case. And his grand jury was not alone in shooting down Pirro’s theory of what constitutes a felony (at least in Trump’s eyes). No less than three grand juries have also refused to indict a woman accused of causing an FBI agent to scrape her hand in a scuffle during an immigration raid. According to Salvador Rizzo and Michael Laris of the Washington Post, this is unusual:

While judges are known to criticize prosecutors from time to time, grand jurors only in rare cases refuse to issue an indictment, which requires them to find only probable cause that a crime was committed, the lowest evidentiary bar in criminal cases. Instances of failed indictments have begun to crop up more since Trump took office this year. Grand jurors in Los Angeles have rejected indictments of people who were arrested for protesting the administration’s immigration enforcement actions, according to the Los Angeles Times. [Link in the original.]

Laris and Rizzo, who covers federal courts for the Post, are correct. As Chris Hayes of MSNBC News noted in his segment on the issue, grand juries will usually indict a ham sandwich if prosecutors present a credible case, but Trump’s DOJ is failing that test. Krystal Ball of the Breakin Pointt podcast, among others, made the same point.

To mix metaphors a little, jurors have enough real-world experience to recognize baloney when they see it.

In an explainer for the Talking Feds podcast (at 3:55). Mimi Rocah recalled when she was a district attorney in suburban Westchester County, NY, she would share the ham sandwich quip with grand jurors, but only in the context of what a real grand jury does in the real world:

 […] I would thank them for their service. And in doing so, I would explain to them what an important service they were doing. And what I would say is, there’s this joke about, you know, a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich and they’re just a rubber stamp. But the reason that’s not true is because the grand jury serves a purpose before the prosecutors even walks in the door. Why? Because we prosecutors […] know we are going to have to present our case to you ordinary citizens. And so we make decisions about what cases should even go to a grand jury based in part on this notion that the grand jury is there and is going to be a check on us.

Thus has it always been, explains Quinta Jurecic of The Atlantic:

Prosecutors have 30 days to secure an indictment from a [federal] grand jury, and the refusal of jurors to indict [Dunn ad two other defendants in Washington] might suggest more trouble ahead for other cases yet to reach this stage. Grand jurors can decline to indict because they don’t believe the government has adequately made its case; they can also decline simply because they don’t like or trust the prosecutor and don’t agree with what the government is trying to do. Despite its reputation as a rubber stamp, this is the core democratic promise of the grand jury, and its power in the face of government overreach.

The Trump administration has already run into this problem elsewhere: Following this summer’s demonstrations in Los Angeles, prosecutors in the Central District of California have struggled to secure indictments of anti-ICE protesters before skeptical grand juries.

An open question: Will grand juries in Chicago be skeptical, too, if Trump’s threats of a made-for-TV police drama there come to fruition?

My best guess: Yes. That’s what juries are for.

Like I said above, I don’t have a law degree, but I learned my way around a courthouse from attorneys, bailiffs and sheriff’s deputies who had a good working knowledge of day-to-day operations in several jurisdictions, including a chief deputy who had also served as a county road superintendent down South.

I also had the rare pleasure of covering an election year meet-and-greet in which members of the Tennessee Supreme Court, who ran for re-election as a partisan slate at the time, schmoozed with employees of the county road department. I remember thinking at the time it was probably a good thing for the justices to get out of chambers in Nashville once in a whlle!

Or maybe I was just thinking it was a good thing for me to be writing up the justices’ encounter with everyday highway maintenance workers, the kind of people who serve on juries in other words.

My own expossure to the law had been in grad school at UT-Knoxville, and it was a lot more abstract and rarified. As an undergrad I had studied British consitutional history, and my interest in the subject led to a doctoral dissertation on the spellbinding topic of “The Idea of Limited Government in English History Plays During the Reign of Elizabeth I, 1558-1603.” (No one has inquired about movie rights, alas!) I researched most of it during the Watergate hearings, and I joked my dissertation was the only one in the English Department that had a current news peg.

So now, 50 years later, ancient English legal concepts like due process and the rule of law are back in the news. And I can’t help thinking about my old dissertation, even if it turns me into the kind of bore you don’t want to chat up at a reception.

You see, Trump’s performative photo o[ps in LA and Washington run him up against venerated institutions like the grand jury. I don’t pretend to have a working scholarly knowledge of Elizabethan-era law anymore; (you’ll notice my links in this journal entry are mostly to Wikipedia). But I remember enough to know when Trump is monkeying around with the foundational institutions of the Anglo-American law.

One of them is the jury system. According to several linked Wikipedia articles, it has antecedents among the Anglo-Saxons and other early Germanic tribes, but it developed in Anglo-Norman England during the 12th and 13th centuries. With Magna Carta, the “Great Charter” issued by King John in 1215, it became an enduring part of the English common law.

Technically, Magna Carta began as a draft treaty that attempted to settle a civil war between the king and rebellious barons. Although it was duly agreed to on June 15, 1215, it failed to stop the fighting. but in 1225 John’s son Henry III reissued it in exchange for tax revenue. Henry’s son Edward I reissued it in 1297, and in the process enshrined it in English statute law, a position it still holds in the UK. Among its provisions are several we now consider foundational to due process in Anglo-American law, including this:

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.

Over the years, King John’s text was amended by various monarchs; its protections, including the right to jury trial, were extended to peasants and others who weren’t feudal landholders; and, in 1354 due process was specifically brought in: “No man of what state or condition he be, shall be put out of his lands or tenements nor taken, nor disinherited, nor put to death, without he be brought to answer by due process of law.” Women would not begin to attain full rights, in English or America alike, until the 19th and 20th centuries. But various rights of Englishmen deriving from Magna Carta, including the right to trial by a jury of one’s peers, were incorporated into the US Constitution in the 4th, 5th, 6th and 14th Amendments.

All of which means: If you ran into me at a cocktail party and asked what I thought of Trump’s performative approach to what he confuses with “law and order,” I’d probably say he needs to grow up, quit playing cops-and-robbers and try reading something about due process, Magna Carta, the rules of evidence, trial by jury and the Bill of Rights.

I know I’d add Sir Edward Coke to the president’s reading list.

At various times in the late 16th and 17th centuries, Coke served as Speaker of the House of Commons, Solicitor General, Attorney General, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas and Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench. He also compiled Coke’s Reports, an influential collection of early case law, and Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England, a series of treatises still consulted on early English common law.

Sound arcane and boring? Well, yes, it could be. (I alreeady warned you about what I might say at cocktail parties.) But I was lucky enough to be studying the common law not long after Catherine Drinker Bowen’sThe Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke,, 1552-1634, came out. Her biography made Coke come alive, and I was already a Tudor-Stuart English history nerd, anyway.

On passage in Coke’s Institutes, reviewing a 1607 case known as Prohibitions del Roy, or, if you don’t read old Law French, the Case of Prohibitions (as Wikipedia styles it). It’s noteable chiefly for Coke’s recollection of his conversation with James I after Coke, then serving as chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas, overruled a decision of the king’s. After citing Magna Carta and case law interpreting the charter (” le Stat. de Mag. Charta. cap. 29.,15 25 Ed. 3. cap. 5.16 None may be taken by petition or suggestion made to our Lord the King or his Councill, unless by Judgement” ), Coke linked the doctrines of due process and constitutional government in terms still echoed today: He wrote:

A controversie of Land between parties was heard by the King, and sentence given, which was repealed, for this, that it did belong to the common Law. Then the King said, that he thought the Law was founded upon reason, and that he and others had reason, as well as the Judges: To which it was answered by me, that true it was, that God had endowed his Majesty with excellent Science and great endowments of nature, but his Majesty was not learned in the Lawes of his Realm of England, and causes which concerne the life, or inheritance, or goods, or fortunes of his Subjects; they are not to be decided by naturall reason, but by the artificiall reason and judgment of Law, which Law is an art which requires long study and experience, before that a man can attain to the cognizance of it; And that the Law was the golden metwand [yardstick] and measure to try the Causes of the Subjects; and which protected his Majesty in safety and peace: With which the King was greatly offended, and said, that then he should be under the Law, which was Treason to affirm, as he said;To which I said, that [13th-century jurist Henry de] Bracton saith, Quod Rex non debet esse sub homine, sed sub Deo & Lege. [That the King ought not to be under any man but under God and the law].

What Coke didn’t mention (but Catherine Drinker Bowen did) was that Coke immediately fell to his knees and begged the king’s forgiveness. In any event. James continued to rule more or less as a divine-right monarch. It wasn’t until 1658 that Coke’s views, which tended toward limited or constitutional monarchy, were vindicated. But he was widely cited a hundred years later when British colonists in America had their own issues with the rights of Englishmen.

When I was beginning my research on constitutional monarchy in Shakespeare’s history plays, the whole scene captured my imagination. Coke’s over-the-top flattery of the king, the way he fell to his knees and the way he reaffirmed constitutional principles when he wrote it up later — the king is under God and the law — all of this struck me as very human. I couldn’t help but notice it came up in the Watergate legal battles that led to President Nixon’s resignation, too. (See excerpt from my disserttion copied below.)

So what are my takeaways from the saga of Sean Charles Dunn, aka the “Sandwich Guy?” Here are a few, in no particular order

• If you want to inject a little common sense into an arcane — or patently ridiculous — legal proceeding, empanel a jury. The jurors will bring their real-world experience to bear on whatever fantasies the state’s attorney, or defense counsel, choose to concoct.
• Even a preening narcissist like Trump should be aware that over-the-top flattery isn’t always sincere, no matter how obsequious it may be, and they’ll backtrack and stick to their principles as soon as it’s safe for them to do so. Lord Coke set many a good precedent, and this (imho) is one of them.
• The arc of history may bend toward justice. (I think we all have to believe that.) But it can take a long time. Coke’s dictum — Henry de Bracton’s, to be exact — that the king is under God and the law wasn’t published for 50 years marked by civil war, regicide, interregnum and the restoration of royal government. But ultimately Coke’s side won.
• If you’re going to throw a sandwich at a masked immigration officer wearing body armor, make sure it’s a salami hoagie (Dunn’s weapon of choice) on soft bread. You wouldn’t want to expose yourself to charages of felonious assault, to wit with a deadly deli sandwich.
• If the DOJ’s experience with grand juries in LA and Washington is any guide, I think there’s reason to hope juries made up of real people with real-world experience will know exactly what to think if Trump’s show-biz warriors take their show on the road to Chicago, Baltimore and other cities. That, in turn, gives me hope for our constitutional democracy.

Links and Citations

Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim, “Trump Admin FAILS! Sandwich Guy FREE!,” Breaking Points, Aug. 28, 2025https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU-ITulRQ6M.

Catherine Drinker Bowen’sThe Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke,, 1552-1634 (1957), quoted in my The Idea of Limited Government in English History Plays During the Reign of Elizabeth I, 1558-1603 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1975) https://books.google.com/books/about/%CB%86The_idea_of_Limited_Government_in_Engl.html?id=IAyRzgEACAAJ.

Sir Edward Coke, Prohibitions del Roy (pamphlet, 1658), Online Library of Liberty https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1658-coke-prohibitions-del-roy-pamphlet.

Chris Hayes, “Grand jury laughs off felony for ‘Sandwich Guy’ after ‘unhinged’ Trump admin response,” All in with Chris Hayes,” MSNBC, Aug. 27, 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATrOEdcu230.

Quinta Jurecic, “Trump’s Crime Crackdown Isn’t Holding Up in Court,” The Atlantic, Aug. 31, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/trump-crime-crackdown-courts-dc/684059/.

Salvador Rizzo and Michael Laris, “D.C. judges and grand jurors push back on Trump policing surge,” Washington Post, Aug. 27, 2025 https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/27/trump-crime-surge-court-cases/.

Mimi Rocah, “SHOCKING: Grand Jury SLAPS DOWN Felony Charge for DC SANDWICH THROWER,” Talking Feds with Harry Litman, Aug. 29, 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvhjA9HZNu8.

[Uplinked Sept. 7, 2025]