Sunny Hostin reveals she was 1991 holdout juror in cannibal case

Sunny Hostin, a co-host of ABC’s “The View,” told her fellow panelists this week that she was the anonymous holdout juror who kept a man known as “the Butcher of Tompkins Square Park” from being convicted of murder more than three decades ago.

The admission came Tuesday as the talk show’s panel discussed the mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case, in which 11 of 12 jurors wanted to find Ms. Clancy not criminally responsible for killing her three children before a single holdout blocked a verdict. Ms. Hostin, a former federal prosecutor, said she sided with the 11 — and disclosed that she once played the same role herself, in the 1991 trial of Daniel Rakowitz.

Ms. Hostin was a juror, before attending law school, in the case against Rakowitz, who was accused of murdering his roommate, Monika Beerle, and — according to prosecutors and contemporaneous news accounts — dismembering her body, boiling her remains and serving some of it to homeless people in Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park. According to an on-air transcript of the exchange, Ms. Hostin told her co-hosts, “I saw clearly that he was psychotic,” arguing Rakowitz did not intend to kill Ms. Beerle even though he was later accused of dismembering and boiling her body.

The 1991 case drew national attention at the time, and Rakowitz himself was unrepentant after the verdict, telling the court, “I won’t fault you for your verdict. The prosecution had an overwhelming case against me.” A Manhattan jury deliberated for nine days before unanimously finding Rakowitz not criminally responsible by reason of insanity.

Ms. Hostin said one juror grew so frustrated during deliberations that he threw a chair at her, and that she ultimately swayed all 12 jurors to her position. Rakowitz remains institutionalized at the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on Wards Island. A jury found in 2004 that he was no longer dangerous, but under New York’s forensic-commitment law that finding was advisory only — the court overseeing his case rejected it and ordered him retained, citing his mental illness and history of violence.

Co-hosts Alyssa Farah Griffin and Star Jones reacted with visible shock on set, with Ms. Griffin asking, “And you got this guy off?!” Ms. Hostin — whose birth name is Asuncion Cummings — was quoted by name in a contemporaneous New York Times report on the trial, which she said she pulled up on set to prove the story to her skeptical colleagues.

The revelation drew swift criticism from conservative media watchdogs. NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck called it “beyond parody,” telling Fox News Digital it was “breathtakingly stupid that she would not only admit to this but also act like it’s a badge of honor.” The Media Research Center’s Nicholas Fondacaro separately noted that Ms. Hostin’s account undercut her own past claims about growing up in the Bronx, since Manhattan jurors are summoned only from within that borough — Tompkins Square Park sits in Manhattan’s East Village, near the Stuyvesant Town complex where Mr. Fondacaro’s reporting says her family actually lived.

Ms. Hostin closed the segment by criticizing Ms. Clancy’s defense attorney for seeking to have that trial’s holdout juror investigated, calling the request “despicable” and warning it could have “a chilling effect on juries.”