Sunny Hostin Reveals She Was Holdout Juror in 1991 Cannibal Case

By Sandra Rhodes (/journals/sandra-rhodes)

Long before Lindsay Clancy’s trial ended in a mistrial due to a holdout juror, other trials ended the same way.

“The View” host Sunny Hostin revealed she was a holdout juror where a cannibal was able to avoid prison.

Hostin admitted to being part of the reason “The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park” was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1991.

Her admission was part of the show’s “Hot Topics” when the panel was talking about the Clancy case.

“The insanity defense has been around in Massachusetts for 182 years, so I think it’s well-established. And I thought absolutely that she was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity,” she said of the Clancy trial.

“And 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. I don’t know if people remember it, The Butcher of Tompkins Square. It was in 1991 …” she said.

“The guy who ate the victims?” co-host Joy Behar asked.

“Yes,” Hostin said as panelist Alyssa Farah Griffin gasped.

Hostin, a former federal prosecutor, read from a New York Times article about Rakowitz being acquitted.

“Several jurors questioned afterwards said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict,” Hostin read.

“That was me, and 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 then …,” she explained.

“And you got this guy off?” Griffin asked.

“That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense, and he fed her body parts to the unhoused,” Hostin said.

“All that being said, it was so clear to me in the jury room. And 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.”

“But he is still in a mental institution being treated,” Hostin added.

The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park case involved Rakowitz, a known drug dealer and eccentric who carried around a Bible and live rooster while making threats no one believed. He murdered his roommate Monika Beerle, a 26-year-old dance student, in 1989. He was accused of dismembering her body and boiling her head for soup, which he then said he served to the homeless.