By Sunny Hostin told viewers of ABC’s The View on Sept. 22 that she was the holdout juror who persuaded the rest of a 1991 jury to find Daniel Rakowitz, known as the “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park,” not criminally responsible by reason of insanity. The co-host described overcoming resistance from fellow jurors in a case involving a dismembered woman whose remains were boiled and reportedly served to homeless people.
Hostin offered the account during a discussion of the Lindsay Clancy case, in which a juror’s refusal to accept an insanity defense resulted in a mistrial. “The reason I felt so strongly about this holdout juror is because I was a holdout juror in a case in the Daniel Rakowitz case,” she said. “I don’t know if people remember it, The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park.”
Joy Behar responded, “The guy who ate the victims?” Hostin confirmed the reference and said the trial took place before she attended law school. According to Hostin, members of the show’s production staff initially questioned her account when she brought it up at a meeting, until a producer found a contemporaneous New York Times report.
“Several jurors afterwards said, ‘One holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict.’ That was me,” Hostin said. Her account placed her at the center of the jury’s decision in one of New York’s most gruesome murder cases.
Sunny Hostin brags about being a holdout juror that prevented The Butcher of Thompson Square Park from going to prison.
She admits "once he killed her, he chopped up her body parts, yes, boiled her body parts … and fed her body parts to the unhoused." pic.twitter.com/sLbElgLuGt— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) September 22, 2026
Rakowitz was accused of killing his roommate, 26-year-old Swiss dance student Monika Beerle, in their East Village apartment on Aug. 19, 1989. He dismembered her body and boiled the remains, reportedly using some of them in soup served to homeless people in Tompkins Square Park. Authorities later recovered her skull from a locker at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Hostin said she concluded that Rakowitz had been psychotic, framing his actions after Beerle’s death as a panicked attempt to conceal the killing. “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 … he fed her body parts to the unhoused,” she said. “That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense.”
The sequestered jury deliberated for nine days, and Hostin described an atmosphere of intense hostility toward her position. “One juror threw a chair at me, they were so angry with me. 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 by reason of insanity.”
The 1991 Times account quoted Hostin under her birth name, Asuncion Cummings, offering much the same explanation she gave on television decades later. “We don’t think he intended to kill her. But once he did, he dismembered her body in an effort to commit the perfect crime.” After the verdict, Rakowitz thanked the jury and told its members, “I won’t fault you for your verdict.”
The verdict sent Rakowitz into state psychiatric custody, where he has remained since 1991. Although an advisory jury concluded in 2004 that he was no longer dangerous, courts have kept him institutionalized following proceedings examining his mental illness.
Hostin presented the case as an illustration of her longstanding support for the insanity defense, while her co-hosts reacted with surprise to the details. She defended the outcome by pointing to Rakowitz’s continued confinement: “That’s a different type of prison, and he’s being treated because he’s sick.”
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