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Sunny Hostin says she was 'Butcher of Tompkins Square Park' holdout juror

Brian Niemietz, New York Daily News on

Published in Entertainment News

NEW YORK — Sunny Hostin told her fellow panelists on “The View” that she was the holdout juror responsible for “The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park” being found not guilty by reason of insanity in his 1991 murder trial.

East Village resident Daniel Rakowitz was charged with killing and mutilating a female acquaintance in 1989, then trying to get rid of the evidence by making soup out of her remains and serving it in Tompkins Square Park.

Hostin said on Tuesday that she felt a connection to the murder trial of Massachusetts mother Lindsay Clancy, whose case ended in a Sept. 4 mistrial with all but one juror believing the defendant’s compromises mental state exempted her from criminal culpability.

“The reason … I feel so strongly about this holdout juror is because I was a holdout juror in a case, in the Daniel Rakowitz case,” she said to her shocked castmates.

Hostin, whose name was Asuncion Cummings at the time, said she sat on the jury before starting law school. She went on to become a federal prosecutor, then a television legal analyst.

To make her point, Hostin read a New York Times article about the case that mentions her resistance.

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

 

She continued telling her story to her stunned colleagues.

“That was me, and it was because clearly I saw he was psychotic, he was in psychosis, he did not mean to kill her and once he killed her he panicked," the 57-year-old legal expert explained. “He chopped up her body parts, yes, boiled her body parts, tried to commit the perfect crime.”

Hostin said one angry juror threw a chair at her, but she wouldn’t budge. Eventually the other jurors saw things her way.

“The insanity defense is a real thing,” she said.

She defended her position Monday by saying Rakowitz remains incarcerated in the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on Ward’s Island where he’s receiving treatment and poses no threat to the public.

Massachusetts prosecutors haven’t announced whether they intend to try Clancy again in a criminal court. Her defense team argues the 36-year-old suspect was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she killer her three young children in their suburban Boston home. She’s currently being held in a state-run psychiatric hospital.


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