When Naptime Conflicts With Your Civic Duty?

We’re all expected to do our part for the betterment of the society as a whole. We vote, we volunteer, and we pay our taxes, among other things. In most of those cases — paying taxes aside — norms, rather than laws, govern our behavior, and the penalty for noncompliance is more social than anything else. But there are a handful of cases where being a citizen of a place comes with obligations that can be enforced with criminal penalties. Specifically, in the United States, most citizens have to serve on a jury when called to do so.

There are many exceptions to this, though. In the United States, if you’re not a citizen but are summoned, you typically just let the jury administration know, and you’re done. Some states don’t require people over the age of 70 to serve. Jury rolls aren’t the easiest thing to maintain, and if you move out of state, you may be summoned by your old state for years after — but in almost all cases, you’re ineligible to serve. When I lived in Connecticut and received a jury duty summons, listed among the reasons that would exempt you from service was “I am the Governor or Lieutenant Governor of the state of Connecticut,” which seems like something they could have determined before sending out the summons, but apparently, I could have checked off that box, too. (Doing so would have likely gotten me in trouble; I didn’t try it.) And, in many states, caregivers of young children can get an indefinite postponement if called to serve; courts rarely have daycares on site.

It’s that last one that made Damien Shrader’s brief time as a potential juror so odd.

Shrader received his juror summons in early 2018 from Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania — and it was immediately a mystery as to why. Typically, the jury administration builds its rolls of potential jurors from other public records. When you apply for a driver’s license, pay your taxes, register your home deed, etc., you’re letting the government know that you exist within that domain, and that information makes its way to the people who call you for jury duty. Damien Shrader, though, didn’t do any of those things. He didn’t have a driver’s license, didn’t pay any taxes, and definitely never owned his own home. We know that because when he received his summons, he was unemployed and living at his parent’s house. And there was good reason for that. At the time, Damien Shrader was four years old.

Shrader’s parents and the court system were both befuddled. According to the local ABC News affiliate, “Damien’s mom says he’s only ever gotten one other letter in the mail. And it was from Santa.” And as for the jury administrators, “Luzerne County Courthouse workers think Damien’s name may have gotten on their list when his great-grandmother bought stock for him.” (It’s not clear why that would give the county notice of your residence within its borders.) 

In any event, it was pretty clear that Damien couldn’t serve on a jury. As his mother, Desiree, told local news station WNEP, “[The court] formally excused him because he has preschool that day. We also tried to make sure they don’t request his two-year-old brother come either. We’d prefer to have them wait a little while for jury duty.”

Bonus fact: In some sense, we’re all preschoolers at heart, right? Nap time, no responsibilities, playing with blocks — sounds sublime. And in 2024, we, collectively, proved that point. As CNN reported, in the first quarter of that year, “adults bought more toys for themselves than for any other age group [ . . . ] first time ever, surpassing toys for even the historically-dominant preschooler market.” Previously, toy manufacturers did best with consumers (or, well, their parents and grandparents) ages three to five, but from January to April of 2024, “consumers 18 years of age and up spent $1.5 billion in toy-related purchases [ . . . ] overtaking the three-to five-year-old demographic as the most important age group for the toy industry.”

From the Archives: The Day Care Fine That Backfired: The goal was to get parents to pick up their kids on time. It didn’t work.