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Notes -
Do you know what the precise charges were? I see news stories saying "assault", which, yeah, he was totally guilty by the dictionary meaning, but laws usually get much more fine-grained than that.
DC does allow juries to convict on a "lesser included offense" when the charge is for a greater offense that necessarily includes the lesser offense, so there's no way for a criminal-friendly or just-stupid DA there to let a criminal walk away free from a misdemeanor assault by mischarging them with felony assault instead.
But it might have mattered to the jury if prosecutors overcharged; jury nullification is so much easier to pull off if the DA pisses off the jury first.
Or ... does DC even define an appropriate level of assault charge? In Texas I think this would be a Class C Misdemeanor Assault, offensive contact without physical injury, but the weakest assault level I can find in DC is "Simple Assault" which requires there to be an attempt "to do injury to the person of another", and it wouldn't be crazy for a jury to decide that a short-range ballistic sandwich just wasn't possibly going to do any injury. Maybe there was no better charge possible than misdemeanor destruction of property, if the mustard stains just wouldn't come out?
(IANAL, IANYL, please don't throw food at anyone anywhere or encourage others to do so, etc.)
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