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YARMOUTH, Mass. -- Like many people Jacob Clark doesn't want to go to jury duty. But unlike most people he has a legitimate excuse, he's only 9 years old.
When Jacob got the summons he asked a pretty basic question, expected from any 9-year-old, "What's jury duty?"
Makes sense. At this stage in the game Jacob is more interested in riding his bike than determining guilt or innocence, but he seems to have a good handle on how it all works.
"If you're picked then you go up to the judge and then say guilty or not guilty," explained Jacob.
"I think he's do well. I think he's impartial. He'd be able to be objective as long as there's no jury tampering or someone who offered him X-Box games he would do as they asked. But besides that, he's a very impartial kid," says Jacob's dad, Robert proudly.
According to the state's jury commissioner, census records in Jacob's hometown of Yarmouth indicate Jacob was born in 1982 instead of 2002, which would make him 30 instead of nine.
"It could have been a data entry error at the town. It could have been on the census form the parents filled out," said Pamela Wood, Massachusetts Jury Commissioner.
Wood says a child gets called for jury duty once or twice a year.
Jacob's grandmother told the third-grader it was a good excuse to miss a day of school.
The mistake was quickly corrected, but this is not the first time Jacob has been called for jury duty. He first got summoned when he was just 2 years old, which describes aptly for a 9-year-old, "weird."
