By The Daily Caller (U.S.) | Created at 2026-09-23 00:51:42 | Updated at 2026-09-25 01:59:13
2 days ago
“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin shocked her colleagues after admitting Tuesday that she helped keep a notorious “cannibal killer” out of prison in 1991.
As the panel discussed the lone holdout juror and mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case, Hostin said she was a member of the jury in the case of murderer and cannibal Daniel Rakowitz. In 1989, Rakowitz murdered 26-year-old Swiss woman Monika Beerle, dismembered her body, boiled her remains, and served them in a soup to the homeless in New York City’s Tompkins Square Park. However, a Manhattan jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity after 9 days of deliberations in February 1991. (RELATED: Massachusetts Responds To Lindsay Clancy Failure By Expanding Home Surveillance Of New Moms)
“It was before I went to law school,” Hostin explained. “And when I brought it up at the ‘Hot Topics’ meeting, I don’t think everyone believed me, and then my producer looked it up, and I’m in the New York Times. And apparently, several jurors afterwards said, ‘One holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict.’ 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.”
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
“He chopped up her body parts, yes, boiled her body parts, tried to commit the perfect crime, and —” Hostin said before co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin interrupted.
“And you got this guy off?!”
“That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense,” Hostin replied. “And he fed her body parts to the unhoused.”
“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,” Hostin continued.
The New York Times reported in 1991 that “one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict.”
“I won’t fault you for your verdict,” Rakowitz said after the verdict was reached, according to The New York Times. “The prosecution had an overwhelming case against me. But I’ll be getting out soon and I’ll sell a lot of marijuana so I can bring to justice the people who actually committed this crime.”
Rakowitz said he would have rather gone to prison than a state hospital for the criminally insane because he did not want to be medicated. He also offered to smoke a joint with the judge, Justice Robert M. Haft.
“But the judge waved him off with an embarrassed smile and called the trial a ‘lulu,’” The Times reported.
