“The View” host Sunny Hostin said that she was the holdout juror in the high-profile “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park” trial in 1991.
Hostin spoke about her time serving on that jury during a discussion about the Lindsay Clancy case, which ended this month in a mistrial with the jury split 11-1.
“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,” Hostin said on Tuesday’s episode, to the shock of her castmates.
Rakowitz was accused of killing and dismembering Monika Beerle, a 26-year-old dance student, then boiling her body parts and feeding them in a soup to people in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village of Manhattan in 1989.
He was found not guilty by reason of insanity at his 1991 trial, which dominated headlines.
Hostin said she served on the jury before she went to law school.
“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,” she said.
The show then aired a picture of a newspaper clipping from an old New York Times article that read: “Several jurors questioned afterward said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict.”
“That was me,” Hostin said. “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 he fed her body parts to the unhoused.”
The jury deliberated for an intense nine days, and its talks were at times combative, Hostin recalled.
“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,” she said.
Rakowitz was ordered in 2010 to remain at maximum-security Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on Ward’s Island.
Hostin noted that Rakowitz remains in a mental institution, which she called “a different type of prison.”
Her castmates were stunned by Hostin’s revelation, some appearing to disagree with her position in the jury.
Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin said, “And you got this guy off?” as Hostin described the grisly crime. Star Jones, who was seated next to Hostin, joked, “Excuse me, can I move over?”
Speaking about the Clancy case, Hostin called Massachusetts’ insanity defense “well-established” and said she agreed Clancy was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity.
Clancy’s defense argued she was not criminally responsible for killing her three children because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
Some jurors have said one holdout juror did not want to acquit. That juror, Michael P. Desronvil, spoke out last week, saying in a statement, “Based on all the physical evidence, key witnesses, and what the prosecution presented, I thought it was enough proof that she [Clancy] knew exactly what she was doing and planned.”
