{"id":355343,"date":"2026-09-24T03:36:25","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T03:36:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/355343\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T03:36:25","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T03:36:25","slug":"sunny-hostin-was-butcher-of-tompkins-square-park-holdout-juror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/355343\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunny Hostin was ‘Butcher of Tompkins Square Park’ holdout juror"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sunny Hostin told her fellow panelists on \u201cThe View\u201d that she was the holdout juror responsible for \u201cThe Butcher of Tompkins Square Park<\/a>\u201d being found not guilty by reason of insanity<\/a> in his 1991 murder trial.<\/p>\n

East Village resident Daniel Rakowitz was charged with killing and mutilating a female acquaintance in 1989, then trying to get rid of the evidence by making soup out of her remains and serving it in Tompkins Square Park.<\/p>\n

Hostin said on Tuesday that she felt a connection to the murder trial of Massachusetts mother Lindsay Clancy, whose case ended in a Sept. 4 mistrial with all but one juror<\/a> believing the defendant\u2019s compromises mental state exempted her from criminal culpability.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason \u2026 I feel so strongly about this holdout juror is because I was a holdout juror in a case, in the Daniel Rakowitz case,\u201d she said to her shocked castmates.<\/p>\n

\"DanielDaniel Rakowitz reacting as the verdict is read at Manhattan Supreme Court in 2004. (Bryan Smith for New York Daily News)<\/p>\n

Hostin, whose name was Asuncion Cummings at the time, said she sat on the jury before starting law school. She went on to become a federal prosecutor<\/a>, then a television legal analyst.<\/p>\n

To make her point, Hostin read a New York Times article about the case that mentions her resistance.<\/p>\n

\u201cSeveral jurors questioned afterwards said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict,\u201d the article said.<\/p>\n

She continued telling her story to her stunned colleagues.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat 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.\u00a0 the 57-year-old legal expert explained. \u201cHe chopped up her body parts, yes, boiled her body parts, tried to commit the perfect crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hostin said one angry juror threw a chair at her, but she wouldn\u2019t budge. Eventually the other jurors saw things her way.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe insanity defense is a real thing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\"SunnySunny Hostin. (Jamie McCarthy\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

She defended her position Monday by saying Rakowitz remains incarcerated<\/a> in the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on Ward\u2019s Island where he\u2019s receiving treatment and poses no threat to the public.<\/p>\n

Massachusetts prosecutors haven\u2019t announced whether they intend to try Clancy again in a criminal court. Her defense team argues the 36-year-old suspect was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she killer her three young children in their suburban Boston home. She\u2019s currently being held in a state-run psychiatric hospital<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sunny Hostin told her fellow panelists on \u201cThe View\u201d that she was the holdout juror responsible for \u201cThe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":355344,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[266,85,607,9,24,12,63,122,124,123,2632],"class_list":["post-355343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-crime-and-public-safety","tag-latest-headlines","tag-national-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-news","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-snyde"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/355344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}