American bureaucracy has many documented flaws, but one of its more underappreciated ones is that it apparently cannot tell a registered voter from a housecat.
A viral post on X by user @Bennieeexyz this week detailed six weeks of increasingly futile attempts to explain to the American legal system that his cat could not serve on a jury. The cat, Felix Martinez, got his name on the voter rolls after his owner’s last name appeared on his vet records, and the summons followed. The county clerk demanded a medical exemption. The vet provided one, citing “species-related limitations.” The court rejected it anyway.
Jury duty letter came addressed to my cat.
Not a mistake. “Felix Martinez” – that’s his full name according to his vet records.
My last name. His first name. Somehow he’s a registered voter now.
Called the county clerk.
Me: My cat got summoned for jury duty.
Clerk: Is the…— 𝕭𝖊𝖓𝖓𝖎𝖊
(@Bennieeexyz) July 8, 2026
It took physically bringing Felix to the courthouse to end it. A clerk looked into the carrier, realized what she was dealing with, and said “He’s a cat” — which, the owner noted, had been his position for six weeks. A supervisor traced it to a data error and dismissed the case immediately.
The voter registration removal came as part of the deal. A week after that, the owner got a piece of mail: his own voter registration card, confirming that Felix had been a registered voter for some time before his human ever was. The author later said he made the whole story up.
Man’s Cat Receives Jury Duty Summons, Spends Six Weeks Fighting to Get Out of It
Here’s the thing, though. The story hit so hard because a version of it actually happened. In late 2009, a Boston couple named Anna and Guy Esposito received a jury duty summons for their cat, Sal, after listing him under “pets” on a city census form. Anna filed to have Sal disqualified on the grounds that he “cannot speak English.” The jury commissioner denied it.
She got a letter from Sal’s vet confirming he was, in fact, a cat. Officials initially remained unconvinced. “When they ask him guilty or not guilty, what’s he supposed to say, meow?” Anna told local news at the time. Guy, for his part, told reporters Sal was a fan of crime shows and “knows right and wrong” but was still underqualified for jury duty. Sal was eventually excused.
Sal’s story sat dormant until 2011, when the Huffington Post picked it up as new, and then NPR, the Daily Mail, and dozens of other outlets followed without checking the dateline. CBS News later ran a corrective piece calling it a textbook example of the viral rewrite echo chamber, in which news organizations cite each other as sources and nobody asks the obvious questions. The Sal story, which was genuine, got so muddled in retelling that even its basic facts became contested.
Which is probably why the Felix story spread the way it did. Nobody read it and thought, “that could never happen.” They read it and thought about every time they’ve been on hold with a government office for forty minutes over something that should have taken two. The Sal case already proved the system is capable of this. Felix just wrote it funnier.
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