Sunny Hostin’s cannibal-trial holdout claim complicated by 1991 record

“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin spent this week defending her on-air claim that she alone forced the 1991 “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park” killer into an insanity acquittal — a claim a fuller archival record has complicated without fully resolving.

Ms. Hostin made the claim Tuesday while discussing the mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case, telling her co-hosts she had served on the jury that acquitted Daniel Rakowitz of murdering and dismembering his roommate, Monika Beerle, in 1989. Producers found her quoted in a 1991 New York Times clip reporting that one holdout juror had blocked a guilty verdict. “That was me,” she told her castmates.

Jurors quoted in 1991 by the Daily News, Newsday and The Associated Press instead described the holdout as an unemployed man, not Ms. Hostin — a discrepancy Fox News laid out in detail this week. One juror, Valerie Holmes, said the panelist was “very determined, very manipulative and he didn’t mind how long he stayed here,” according to an archive NewsBusters unearthed.

The record turned out to be less clean than a simple debunking, though. A Newsday article from the same day, also surfaced by NewsBusters, reported that deliberations actually ended with two holdouts rather than one — the unemployed man described elsewhere, and a second juror who also favored the insanity verdict. That Newsday account quoted a juror identified as “Asuncion Cummings,” Ms. Hostin’s maiden name, describing the outcome as something the panel “had to compromise” on, without spelling out that Cummings was the second holdout. Ms. Hostin has since said the account backs up her claim.

Pressed on the discrepancy, she did not back down. “I was. I was the holdout juror,” she told Fox News.

Even so, Ms. Hostin’s own words from 1991 sit awkwardly next to this week’s telling. Rather than describing herself as convinced from the outset that Mr. Rakowitz was insane, the archival Newsday quote has her saying, “We had to compromise.”