a jury of your purrs

Many people who get called for jury duty are less than thrilled to have to serve it, partly because it can come at an inopportune time, but I suspect mostly it's the sitting around and doing nothing. People try to come up with all kinds of excuses to bail on jury duty.

Well, here's a situation when the reason not to have to serve is a legitimate one.

I heard about this story today, and it really made me laugh. When I heard one bit of the story, that the wife had included the cat on their census form, then I thought it was pretty stupid for her to do that (I'm just not one of those who considers my cat to be the equivalent of my child), until they clarified that she'd included the cat in the census form under "pets". OK, well, if there's a space for that (even if the form was canine-biased), then that's fine.

But I'm wondering what the jury commissioner thought in denying the request to be excused. Did he/she really think someone was pretending to be a cat to get out of jury service? I mean, I suspect there are ways to check if the "cat story" is true, right? If you watch the video on the page (which is mostly a duplicate of the info in the written story, but you get to see the kitty), it says they even got a letter from the cat's vet, stating that the "Sal" in question is actually a cat. Still, no go.

I'm figuring that with this news story, they won't actually have to show up with their cat and that Sal won't have to set paw in court.