Sunny Hostin bragged on Tuesday’s episode of The View that she was the lone holdout who kept Daniel Rakowitz, the Butcher of Tompkins Square Park, out of prison, but it appears that she lied.
People who sat in that room and the papers that quoted them in 1991 describe an unemployed man who liked the $15 a day and the free meals as the lone holdout in the case.
The Post reports:
But 35 years ago, jurors told The Post, Newsday, the Daily News and the Associated Press that the actual holdout was an unemployed man who wanted to keep the trial going so he could continue getting paid by the court for his civic duty.
A law enforcement source from the time also told The Post this week that the holdout was a man.
“He was unemployed and liked the $15 a day and the three free meals,” juror Valerie Holmes told Newsday in the aftermath of the verdict.
“He liked that we were arguing on and on.”
Holmes reiterated the claim to The Post and The Daily News, describing the holdout as being “very determined” and “manipulative” man determined to get his way.
“From day one, this particular person was determined that the jury was going to find Rakowitz not guilty by reason of mental disease,” jury forewoman Lois Markle told the AP at the time.
Meanwhile, Hostin was quoted as a juror on the case in multiple news clips at the time — but she did not identify herself as the holdout, nor did any of the fellow jurors who talked to the press after the trial.
In a statement to Newsday at the time, under her legal name Asunción Cummings, Hostin also contradicted her current claim.
“We had to compromise. But it is obvious to me he butchered the body and he literally got away with murder. He attempted to commit the perfect crime,” Hostin told the paper.
Hostin claimed she was the holdout during a discussion on The View about the Lindsay Clancy mistrial in Massachusetts, where one juror refused an insanity verdict in the case of the mother who brutally strangled her three children to death.
Hostin said she wanted Clancy to be found not guilty by reason of insanity.
“The reason I felt so strongly about this holdout juror is because I was a holdout juror in the Daniel Rakowitz case. I don’t know if people remember it, the Butcher of Tompkins Square Park,” Hostin said.
Joy Behar asked, “The guy who ate the victims?”
Alyssa Farah Griffin said, “You got this guy off?!”
“That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense. He fed her body parts to the unhoused,” Hostin explained.
“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. 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. 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.”
WATCH:
Hostin said producers checked and found her in The New York Times under her birth name, Asuncion Cummings.
Several jurors told the paper one holdout had blocked a guilty verdict.
“That was me,” she said. “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 he fed her body parts to the unhoused.”
She said the jury was sequestered for nine days, and one got so mad they threw a chair at her.
“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. 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.”
On August 19, 1989, Rakowitz, then a 28-year-old dishwasher and pot dealer in the East Village, killed Monika Beerle, 26, a Swiss dance student at the Martha Graham school who also worked as a dancer and shared an apartment with him.
Police said she had tried to make him move out. Rakowitz told detectives they fought and he killed her, then bought a saw and bags and dismembered her in the bathtub. He boiled bones, he said, “to disinfect them.”
He left her skull in a bucket of kitty litter in a Port Authority Bus Terminal baggage room and led detectives there after his arrest.
A homeless man, Milton Irrizary, testified that Rakowitz brought soup into Tompkins Square Park that contained a human finger.
Rakowitz bragged about the killing in the park and later referred to himself as a cannibal.
Thanks to the holdout juror, the judge declared a mistrial. Rakowitz ended up being sent to Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center, the maximum-security hospital on Wards Island.
In 2004, a retention jury found him still mentally ill, lacking insight, and in need of inpatient care, but not currently dangerous.
Beerle never received justice.
When the Post asked about the records indicating she wasn’t actually the holdout juror, she laughed and doubled down.
“I was. I was the holdout juror,” she said.
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