It began with a viral video that captured the tension of a capital city under federal patrol: a man shouts obscenities at a federal officer and then hurls his sub sandwich at him. The Department of Justice responded with the full force of its authority, charging the man with felony assault.

But when the case was presented to a group of anonymous citizens, something remarkable and constitutionally significant happened: they refused to go along.

The decision by a federal grand jury to decline to indict Sean Charles Dunn is more than a quirky footnote in the ongoing drama of the D.C. crime crackdown. It is a powerful and reassuring case study in one of the most important, and least understood, guardrails of American liberty: the Fifth Amendment’s grand jury clause.

A Felony Charge for a Thrown Sandwich

The context for this incident is the highly charged federal takeover of Washington, D.C. In an effort to project a tough-on-crime image, the U.S. Attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, made a public example of the “sandwich tosser.”

“He thought it was funny. Well, he doesn’t think it’s funny today, because we charged him with felony assault on a police officer,” Pirro said in a video statement. “Stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else.”

The administration’s intent was clear: to use a high-profile felony charge to show that even minor acts of defiance against federal agents would be met with overwhelming force. But they first had to get past the grand jury.

The Shield of the People: The Grand Jury’s Constitutional Role

This is where the story becomes a vital civics lesson. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution states that no person shall be held to answer for a serious crime “unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury.” The framers did not include this by accident.

The grand jury is designed to be a shield, standing between the immense power of a government prosecutor and the individual citizen. Its job is to hear the government’s evidence in secret and decide if there is probable cause to believe a crime was actually committed. It is a check on power, a guardrail to prevent citizens from being subjected to the stress and expense of a public trial based on flimsy evidence or for political reasons.

A Legal Saying, Flipped on its Head

There is a famous, cynical saying in the legal world, popularized by former New York Judge Sol Wachtler, that a prosecutor has so much influence over a grand jury that they could get them to “indict a ham sandwich.” The phrase is meant to convey the idea that the grand jury is merely a rubber stamp for the government.

This case is a stunning and literal inversion of that aphorism. Here, the Department of Justice, with all its power and authority, could not get a grand jury to indict a man for throwing a sandwich.

This is a powerful and hopeful sign that this constitutional check is not dead. It shows that a group of ordinary citizens, when presented with what they likely perceived as a gross and politically motivated overcharge, can and will use their constitutional power to say “no” to the government.

In the midst of the tense and constitutionally fraught federal presence in Washington D.C., this small, almost comical, event is a moment of profound civic importance. It is a reminder that the ultimate check on government power in our republic does not always come from the Supreme Court or the halls of Congress.

Sometimes, it comes from a small, secret room, where a group of anonymous citizens, empowered by the Fifth Amendment, quietly perform their constitutional duty.