By Chelsea Rudman

hat would you do to get out of jury duty? Make up a lame excuse? Send in human remains? How about just claiming you’re a criminal? Would-be juror Benjamin Ratcliffe opted for the latter last week. The 21-year-old Columbus, Ohio native attempted to dodge jury selection by claiming he was a heroin addict and a killer. The judge threw him in jail for one night, charging him with contempt of the court and obstruction of justice. Maybe he was too high to plead insanity. New York has its own crop of bizarre jury duty excuses, ranging from the comic to the outright morbid. The Times reported in April that hemorrhoids is a popular excuse; one man mailed in a used box of Anusol. Another prankster wrote on his summons, blotched yellow and orange, “My cat threw up on the form.” The wife of one prospective juror sent in a small plastic bag full of gray powder on behalf of her husband, with a note: “Some of his ashes from the crematorium.” And a transplanted New Yorker living in Vero Beach, Fla., was particularly enraged when asked to pay a $100 fine for skipping jury duty because of his 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. shift. The TCPalm reported that the angered John McGrath said he would rather “go to Alcatraz for 10 years” than pay the fine. Yikes.