During a recent episode of “The View,” Sunny Hostin dropped a bombshell blast from the past that took her co-hosts by surprise.
During the episode that aired Tuesday, September 22, Hostin and her co-hosts on “The View” were discussing the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, which ended in a mistrial when one juror prevented Clancy from being acquitted.
“I thought absolutely that she was not criminally responsible for reason of insanity,” Hostin said of Clancy.
Hostin revealed that she was bringing her own unique perspective to that particular discussion, having been a juror on a high-profile murder trial back in the early 1990s.
“And the reason I feel so strongly about that holdout juror is ’cause I was a holdout juror in the Daniel Rakowitz case,” she revealed.
She Changed the Course of a 1991 Murder Trial
The New York City media extensively covered the 1991 murder trial of Daniel Rakowitz, who’d been known to wander around NYC’s Tompkins Square Park carrying a Bible and accompanied by a live rooster.
After he was charged with a particularly gruesome homicide, Rakowitz was dubbed the “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park” by the press.
As the jury’s only holdout, Hostin played a very special role in how the trial turned out.
“I don’t know if people remember it, the ‘Butcher of Tompkins Square Park.’ It was before I went to law school,” Hostin said, as reported by Us Weekly.
At that point, fellow “View” co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin‘s jaw literally dropped with shock.
“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,” she continued before reading from the Times’ coverage of the trial, which reported that “one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict.”
She then declared, “That was me.”
Sunny Hostin Was the Holdout Juror
ABCAs she read from the story, she recited a quote that she’d given to the newspaper in 1991, then using her real name of Asuncion Cummings.
“We don’t think he intended to kill her,” she said in that quote. “But once he did, he dismembered her body in an effort to commit the perfect crime.”
As the story pointed out, she was the sole holdout juror who led to Rakowitz being found not guilty by reason of insanity. “That’s how much I believe in the insanity defence,” Hostin added.
“I saw clearly that he was psychotic,” Hostin told her “View” co-hosts. “He was in psychosis. He did not mean to kill her, and once he killed her, he panicked,”
According to Hostin, the jury was sequestered for nine days, and her stance led to a contentious situation when one of her fellow jurors became so exasperated he flung a chair at her.
“We ended up voting unanimously that he was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity,” she explained.
“But he’s still in a mental institution being treated. That’s a different type of prison, and he’s being treated because he’s sick,” Hostin said of Rakowitz, who remains institutionalized at age 64.
