Twelve jurors. Nine days locked away together. One person who refused to sign onto a guilty verdict.
Decades later, that person sits at the table of “The View.” Sunny Hostin, a co-host of the daytime program, revealed her role in the case on Tuesday’s broadcast, surprising the women seated beside her.
Hostin, 57, said she served on the jury in the 1991 trial of Daniel Rakowitz, the defendant New York’s press labeled the “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park.”
The case drew heavy attention across New York City at the time.
She joined that jury before she enrolled in law school and long before she became a federal prosecutor, Hostin told the panel.
The subject came up while the hosts, with guest co-host Star Jones filling a seat, covered the ongoing Lindsay Clancy case.
Hostin said she understands why some people want courts to look into the “insanity defense,” as she put it.
She then linked that discussion to her own history. “The reason I felt so strongly about this holdout juror [in the Clancy case] is because I was a holdout juror,” Hostin said.
Joy Behar recognized the defendant’s name at once. “The guy who ate the victims?” Behar asked. Alyssa Farah Griffin reacted next with, “You were on that jury!?”
Sara Haines wanted more. “You’re going to need to explain more,” Haines said.
The case centered on Monika Beerle. Rakowitz stood trial over her death, which occurred in 1989. He boiled her body parts and later fed them to unhoused people in New York City. A jury acquitted him by reason of insanity.
Hostin told her colleagues she saw the evidence through one lens from the start. She said she thought “clearly that he was psychotic.”
She also laid out how she believed the events unfolded. In her opinion, Rakowitz “did not mean to kill her, and once he killed her, he panicked, he chopped up her body parts, yes, boiled her body parts.”
Hostin added that he reportedly served the remains to unhoused people in a soup.
To back up her account, Hostin pointed to a 1991 New York Times article.
The paper quoted her under her birth name, Asuncion Cummings, and identified her as the single juror who stopped the others from returning a guilty verdict.
“We don’t think he intended to kill her,” Hostin said in that report. “But once he did, he dismembered her body in an effort to commit the perfect crime.”
Griffin pressed her on the outcome. “You got this guy off!?” she asked. Hostin rejected that description and again stated her support for finding Rakowitz insane.
“That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense. He fed her body parts to the unhoused,” Hostin said.
She then took the panel inside the jury room. “We were sequestered for nine days. One juror threw a chair at me, they were so angry with me,” Hostin said.
Hostin said she did not back down.
“But, one by one, I picked them off. I said, ‘What about this? What about that?’ We ended up, all 12, unanimously voting that he was not criminally responsible on reason of insanity,” she said.
She closed by describing where Rakowitz went after the verdict.
“He is still in a mental institution being treated. That’s a different type of prison, and he’s being treated because he’s sick,” Hostin said.
Rakowitz remains at the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center in New York. A separate jury ruled in 2004 that he no longer posed a danger to society.
Jury duty was not Hostin’s only time inside a high-profile courtroom. She also gained access to watch proceedings during Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in 2024.
