Man Who Threw Sandwich at Us Border Agent Not Guilty of Assault

I would say Gregory Lairmore is a po' boy full of shit.

By this standard most of the sports player in the nation should be indicted.

Good news we unanimously rejected it

This was filed as a misdemeanor case, because federal felonies require a grand jury indictment, and the grand jury declined to indict when the prosecutor tried to bring felony charges.

To be fair, they only tried to charge the thrower, and not the sandwich, so maybe the old saying might have held up with the right defendant here.

(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).

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...

What we have is a case of jury nullification, where a jury recognized the crime and decided not to convict. This is probably fine with the prosecution though, as the real punishment was holding him in jail, getting him fired, and wasting his life savings defending this case.

Perhaps they wanted to have sandwiches for lunch (or to throw at each other[0]) while deliberating, so they took their time?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBXFTksOxr0

That it was a simple question doesn’t mean that the jury was initially unanimous on the answer,

In this specific case we are discussing, he actually was charged with (and acquitted of) a violation of the provision you reference 18 USC § 111, which is a misdemeanor when done by simple assault [0], after the US Attorney failed to convince a grand jury to indict for a felony violation.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/111

It almost sounded like a post hoc rationalization, to make an outburt sound clever and intentional. Likely a stressful situtation to put yourself in.

Or was it meant to be a reply to someone else's comment and would make more sense in that context?

My hypothesis is that people generally feel that police face little to no accountability and so there is a more serious double standard to contend with.

If a 90 year old person with a cane threw a sandwich at a 6'3" 250 pound professional athelete, everyone would check if the 90 year old was ok. Vice versa, and there would be a lot of anger and an arrest.

The state's law enforcement, with weapons, training, ballistic vests and helmets, etc. is the ultimate power. You can't do bodily injury to them, but minor contact and sandwiches are usually not taken seriously.

People ask the same question about situations where there is discrimination - is it a double-standard? They are forgetting about relative power: If someone is in a group that is threatened - e.g., an Auburn fan in a large crowd of rowdy, drunk Alabama fans (Auburn and Alabama are arch-rivals) - then an Alabama fan saying something threatening is a real threat, a real danger. If the Auburn fan says something threatening to the 100 Alabama fans around them, it doesn't represent anything; it's almost funny.

The equation is,

  Threat x Power = Danger