“The View” host Sunny Hostin bragged about how she was once a holdout juror and helped a cannibal avoid prison.
Hostin stunned other members of the panel when she admitted to being part of the reason “The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park” was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1991. The discussion came up on Tuesday as the hosts discussed the Lindsay Clancy case.
“The insanity defense has been around in Massachusetts for 182 years, so I think it’s well-established. And I thought absolutely that she was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity,” she said of the Clancy trial, which ended in a mistrial earlier this month.
“And the reason I felt that — I feel so strongly about this holdout juror is because I was a holdout juror in a case; in the Daniel Rakowitz case. I don’t know if people remember it, The Butcher of Tompkins Square. It was in 1991 …” she said while trailing off.
“The guy who ate the victims?” fellow host Joy Behar asked.
“Yes,” Hostin confirmed, causing panelist Alyssa Farah Griffin to gasp.
Hostin, a former federal prosecutor, went on to read from a New York Times article about Rakowitz being acquitted.
“Several jurors questioned afterwards said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict,” Hostin read aloud from the article.
“That was me, and it was because I saw clearly that he was psychotic, he was in psychosis, he did not mean to kill her and once he killed her he panicked. He chopped up her body parts, yes, boiled her body parts, tried to commit the perfect crime and then …” she explained before Griffin cut her off.
“And you got this guy off?” Griffin asked in disbelief.
“That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense, and he fed her body parts to the unhoused,” she went on.
“All that being said, it was so clear to me in the jury room. And we were sequestered for nine days, one juror threw a chair at me. They were so angry with me but one by one I picked them off and said, ‘What about this? What about that?’ and we ended up, all 12, unanimously voting that he was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity.”
“But he is still in a mental institution being treated,” Hostin added.
The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park case involved Daniel Rakowitz, a known drug dealer and eccentric who carried around a Bible and live rooster while making threats no one believed. He slaughtered his roommate Monika Beerle, a 26-year-old dance student, in 1989. He was accused of dismembering her body and boiling her head for soup, which he then said he served to the homeless.
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