The Lindsay Clancy mistrial ended with a hung jury last month.
Now the woman who held out is bragging about doing the same thing 35 years ago for a man who boiled a woman and fed her to the homeless.
Sunny Hostin just broke her silence on the juror who kept a cannibal out of prison with this surprising confession.
The View Host Who Set a Monster Free
It happened on air this week, casually, the way Hostin does everything – like she’s sharing a fun anecdote at a cocktail party.
Hostin told her The View co-hosts she was the holdout juror in the 1991 trial of Daniel Rakowitz, the man New Yorkers knew as “The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park.”
That’s the guy who murdered his roommate Monika Beerle in 1989, dismembered her body, boiled her remains into soup, and served it to homeless people in the park.
Her skull turned up in a bucket of kitty litter at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
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Hostin said she saw “clearly that he was psychotic” and held out for nine days until the jury returned a not guilty by reason of insanity verdict.
She was so proud of this that she confirmed it herself – with a New York Times citation.
“My producer looked it up and I’m in The New York Times,” Hostin said, “and apparently ‘several jurors questioned afterwards said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict.’ That was me.”
One Juror. One Cannibal. Thirty-Five Years of Silence.
Joy Behar looked at her co-host and asked, “The guy who ate the victims?”
That tells you everything.
Even the woman who has spent decades defending every left-wing legal theory imaginable was visibly stunned.
When Joy Behar is the voice of reason in the room, something has gone deeply, profoundly wrong.
Hostin was in her early twenties when she sat on that jury.
And in her first major act of civic duty, she personally prevented eleven other jurors from convicting a man who had served human remains as food to unsuspecting homeless New Yorkers.
Rakowitz himself told the jury after the verdict, “I hope someday we can smoke a joint together.”
That’s the man Sunny Hostin decided deserved the benefit of the doubt.
The Insanity Defense as a Hobby
Here is what Hostin said on air, without a hint of shame:
“That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense. He fed her body parts to the unhoused,” she said.
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She said that.
She named the crime – feeding human body parts to homeless people – and used it as the reason she was right to let him walk out of a courtroom.
The other jurors were furious.
“We were sequestered for nine days,” she said. “One juror threw a chair at me, they were so angry with me.”
That chair-thrower had a point.
Hostin raised the Rakowitz case while defending her position on the Lindsay Clancy trial – the Massachusetts mother who strangled her three children and then jumped from a window.
The Clancy case ended in a mistrial last month after a deadlocked jury could not reach a verdict.
Hostin supported acquitting Clancy by reason of insanity, arguing postpartum psychosis made her not criminally responsible.
The problem is that postpartum psychosis is transient – once treated, there is no legal justification to keep a patient institutionalized indefinitely.
Which means Hostin isn’t just philosophically committed to letting killers walk.
She’s committed to the specific legal mechanism that gives them the best shot at getting out.
What Happens to Killers Found Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity
Rakowitz has been held at Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on Wards Island since his 1991 acquittal.
He has petitioned for transfer to a less secure facility multiple times.
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Courts have blocked him every time – so far.
But the legal mechanism Hostin championed means those petitions will keep coming.
The not guilty by reason of insanity verdict didn’t lock him up more securely than a prison sentence would have.
It created a pathway for periodic release hearings – each one a new opportunity for the system to decide he’s no longer a threat.
In 2004, a jury actually found Rakowitz was no longer dangerous – but concluded he remained mentally ill and kept him institutionalized anyway.
That was one jury away from a different outcome.
One holdout juror, 35 years ago, made sure the mechanism existed at all.
She Prosecuted Predators for Years Then Freed One on National TV
Hostin went on to become a federal sex crimes prosecutor.
She spent years in courtrooms arguing that perpetrators should be held accountable.
Then she sits down on national television and brags – that’s the right word, brags – about the time she personally intervened to ensure a man who boiled a human body and fed it to park inhabitants walked out of court with no criminal conviction.
She called it “clear” in the jury room that Rakowitz was psychotic.
Eleven other jurors disagreed.
One of them threw a chair.
And Sunny Hostin called it one of her finest moments.
Your 70-year-old mother doesn’t need a legal analysis to understand what happened here.
A young woman sat on a jury, held out for nine days against eleven other Americans, and freed New York City’s most notorious cannibal.
Then she waited 35 years and told the whole country about it on ABC.
Sources:
- C. Douglas Golden, “Sunny Hostin Admits to Helping Acquit Maniac Who Boiled Woman, Fed Her to Homeless New Yorkers,” The Western Journal, September 23, 2026.
- “A Manhattan Jury Finds Rakowitz Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity,” The New York Times, February 23, 1991.
- “Mistrial Declared in Lindsay Clancy Murder Case,” The New Daily, September 5, 2026.
- “Lindsay Clancy Goes on Trial Over Whether Postpartum Psychosis Drove Her to Kill Her 3 Children,” The Nightly, 2026.
- “Cannibal’s ‘Helpful’ in Ward: Lawyer,” New York Post, June 22, 2004.
