Sunny Hostin shocked her The View cohosts when she revealed that she was the “holdout juror” in “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park” Daniel Rakowitz’s highly publicized murder trial in 1991.
Hostin, 57, made the admission while discussing Lindsay Clancy’s trial during the Tuesday, September 22, episode of The View.
“I was a holdout juror in the Daniel Rakowitz case. I don’t know if people remember it, the ‘Butcher of Tompkins Square Park,’” Hostin said. “It was before I went to law school.”
She continued, “When I brought it up at the ‘Hot Topics’ meeting, I don’t think everyone believed me. And then my producer looked it up and I’m in The New York Times.”
Hostin read a few paragraphs from the Times’ story about the trial, which said that “one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict.”
Hostin then shared a quote that she gave to the newspaper in 1991 under her real name, Asuncion Cummings. “We don’t think he intended to kill her,” she said at the time. “But once he did, he dismembered her body in an effort to commit the perfect crime.”
Rakowitz, 64, was on trial for the 1989 murder of Monika Beerle. After he killed her, he dismembered, boiled and fed her body to homeless people in New York City’s Tompkins Square Park. The jury ultimately found Rakowitz not guilty by reason of insanity.
“I saw clearly that he was psychotic,” Hostin said on The View. “He was in psychosis. He did not mean to kill her, and once he killed her, he panicked. He chopped up her body, yes, boiled her body parts, tried to commit the perfect crime and … he fed her body parts to the unhoused.”
After her cohosts shared their shock over Hostin’s involvement in the trial, she continued to look back on the deliberations experience. In addition to being sequestered for nine days, she claimed that one juror had thrown a chair at her.
“We ended up voting unanimously that he was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity. But he’s still in a mental institution being treated. That’s a different type of prison, and he’s being treated because he’s sick,” she explained of Rakowitz.
In 2004, a Manhattan jury found Rakowitz to no longer be dangerous. He is still being held at New York’s Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center, where he is expected to spend the rest of his life after a judge determined he was still mentally ill.
While Rakowitz’s trial had a resolution, the future of Clancy’s case remains unclear. After she was charged with the murders of her three kids in January 2023, her defense team argued she should not be held criminally responsible due to her postpartum psychosis. The case was declared a mistrial on September 4 after one holdout juror prevented the jury from coming to a unanimous verdict.
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