“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin told viewers Tuesday that she was the sole holdout juror in the 1991 trial of Daniel Rakowitz, the East Village man known as the “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park,” whose jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity in the killing of his roommate.
Rakowitz, a marijuana dealer and neighborhood eccentric, killed 26-year-old dance student Monika Beerle in 1989. He dismembered her body, boiled her head, and later claimed he ate her brains and fed some of her remains to homeless people in the area.
Hostin, 57, a former federal prosecutor, made the disclosure during a panel discussion about Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother whose own insanity defense is currently the subject of legal wrangling. Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, has pushed to investigate a holdout juror in that case who favored conviction, examining that juror’s cellphone use during deliberations and truthfulness on a pretrial questionnaire.
Defending the insanity defense broadly, Hostin told her co-hosts, “The insanity defense has been around in Massachusetts for 182 years, so I think it’s well established. And I thought absolutely she was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity.”
She then connected that view to her own history. “And the reason I felt that — I feel so strongly about this holdout juror is became I was a holdout juror in a case in the Daniel Rakowitz case. I don’t know if people remember it, The Butcher of Thompkins Square. It was in 1991,” she said.
Co-host Joy Behar asked, “The guy who ate the victims?” Hostin confirmed it was, prompting panelist Alyssa Farah Griffin to gasp and ask, “You were on that jury?”
Hostin said colleagues doubted her account during a pre-show meeting, until a producer located a New York Times article about Rakowitz’s acquittal. She read from it on air: “Several jurors questioned afterwards said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict.”
“That was me, and it was because clearly I saw he was psychotic, he was in psychosis, he did not mean to kill her and once he killed her he panicked,” Hostin said. “He chopped up her body parts, yes, boiled her body parts, tried to commit the perfect crime and then—”
Griffin interrupted, incredulous: “And you got this guy off?!”
“That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense, and he fed her body parts to the unhoused,” Hostin replied.
Co-host Star Jones half-joked, “Excuse me, can I move over? I don’t need to be here,” as panelist Sara Haines shifted uncomfortably in her seat.
Hostin described the deliberations as contentious. “It was so clear to me in the jury room. 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.”
Griffin, who has said she does not believe Clancy’s mental state at the time she killed her three children excuses her actions, said, “That’s my issue with the law.” Hostin responded, “But he is still in a mental institution being treated.”
Turning back to the Clancy case, Hostin criticized Reddington’s push to investigate the holdout juror who wanted to convict her. “That’s going to have a chilling effect on juries,” she said. “Jury duty is duty. It is one of the most important things I think I’ve ever done in my life. It was extremely difficult, but to investigate a juror for doing his or her duty is despicable.”
Hostin’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
