SUNNY HOSTIN REVEALS SHE WAS THE HOLDOUT JUROR WHO SPARED THE “BUTCHER OF TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK” — HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED

Posted by Team - September 24, 2026

“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin revealed Tuesday that she was the lone holdout juror in the 1991 trial of a notorious New York City cannibal killer — resulting in the “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park” being found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Hostin made the boast, which stunned her colleagues, in a discussion about Lindsay Clancy’s own insanity defense, and the attempts by Clancy’s lawyer to question the holdout juror in that case.

The gruesome Butcher of Tompkins Square Park case involved Daniel Rakowitz, a known weed dealer and East Village eccentric, who slaughtered his roommate, 26-year-old dance student and sometime-stripper Monika Beerle, in 1989.

According to news reports and police at the time, Rakowitz and Beerle got into a fight which turned physical, and he punched her in the throat so hard that it cut off her air circulation, causing her to suffocate.

He then dismembered her and boiled her head for soup, leaving her skull in a bucket of kitty litter in the baggage room at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

He boasted that he ate her brains and also fed some to local homeless people, including a soup one witness testified contained an intact human finger.

Rakowitz was found not guilty by reason of mental disease — an outcome Hostin, 57, took credit for as the jury’s only member not pushing for a conviction.

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

“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 Thompkins Square. It was in 1991…” she trailed off.

“The guy who ate the victims?” cohost Joy Behar interjected.

“Yes,” Hostin replied — drawing an audible gasp from panelist Alyssa Farah Griffin, who clasped her hand to her chest and asked, “you were on that jury?”

Hostin, a former federal prosecutor, said some people didn’t believe her when she brought it up during a pre-show prep meeting, but a producer found an old New York Times article about Rakowitz’s acquittal.

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

The very next paragraph in the article, dated Feb. 23, 1991, quotes Asuncion Cummings — Hostin’s given name.

“‘We don’t think he intended to kill her,’ said a juror, Asuncion Cummings. ‘But once he did, he dismembered her body in an effort to commit the perfect crime,’” the article continued, quoting Hostin directly, though without identifying her as the holdout juror.

“That was me, and it was because clearly I saw he was psycH๏τic, 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 before Griffin cut her off.

“And you got this guy off?!” Griffin said, her mouth agape in shock, prompting a nervous тιтter from the studio audience.

“That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense, and he fed her body parts to the unhoused [homeless],” she continued.

“Excuse me, can I move over? I don’t need to be here,” half-joked cohost Star Jones, who was seated next to Hostin, as panelist Sara Haines appeared to nervously tie her hair up and shift in her seat.

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

Griffin, who has voiced that she doesn’t believe Clancy’s alleged mental state at the time she killed her three children excuses her actions, piped up over cross-chatter, “That’s my issue with the law.”

“But he is still in a mental insтιтution being treated,” Hostin ᴀssured.

The revelation came up during a panel discussion about Clancy attorney Kevin Reddington’s push to investigate the holdout juror in her mistrial who wanted to convict her.

Hostin brought the discussion back to her critique of Reddington’s call for an investigation into the holdout juror’s use of a cellphone during deliberations and his truthfulness in answering a pre-trial questionnaire.

“That’s going to have a chilling effect on juries,” she warned.

“Jury duty is duty. It is one of the most important things I think I’ve ever done in my life. It was extremely difficult, but to investigate a juror for doing his or her duty is despicable.”

After he was found not guilty by reason of insanity, Rakowitz was ordered confined to the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on Wards Island in New York City.

He remained there until 2020, when 100 Kirby inmates deemed by a court to be criminally insane were relocated to the nearby state-run Manhattan Psychiatric Center.

Rakowitz remained incarcerated at MPC as of December, when The Post documented him being whisked outside the facility for fresh air after a plumbing mishap in the building.

Hostin’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin revealed Tuesday that she was the lone holdout juror in the 1991 trial of a notorious New York City cannibal killer —…

SUNNY HOSTIN REVEALS SHE WAS THE HOLDOUT JUROR WHO SPARED THE “BUTCHER OF TOMP­KINS SQUARE PARK” — HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED

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