Notable People
Sunny Hostin might be best known for her work on The View, but this week she revealed that, long before she was famous, she served on the jury of one of New York City’s most notorious murder trials, and that she helped change its outcome. Here’s what happened. What case was Sunny Hostin a juror …
Sunny Hostin might be best known for her work on The View, but this week she revealed that, long before she was famous, she served on the jury of one of New York City’s most notorious murder trials, and that she helped change its outcome. Here’s what happened.
What case was Sunny Hostin a juror on?
Long before she joined The View, Sunny Hostin sat in a New York courtroom as a juror. The year was 1991, and Hostin and her fellow jurors were tasked with deciding whether Daniel Rakowitz, the man dubbed the “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park,” was guilty of murder. He stood accused of killing and dismembering Monika Beerle, a 26-year-old dance student and his roommate, in 1989.
Prosecutors said he boiled her remains and fed them in a soup to people in the Manhattan park. The crime and trial dominated headlines at the time. Most discourse focused on Rakowitz’s mental health, and whether he truly understood what he had done.
Rakowitz was found not guilty by reason of insanity at his 1991 trial, which meant he was institutionalized rather than sent to prison. He is being treated at Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center in New York.
What role did the View star play in the trial?
On Tuesday, Hostin shocked The View viewers when she revealed that she had served on the jury for the Butcher of Tompkins Park case before she went to law school. The story came up while the panel discussed the Lindsay Clancy case. The much-discussed case ended in a mistrial after a single juror held out for a guilty verdict. Clancy’s defense team has since called for that juror to be investigated.
Hostin said she felt strongly about the issuen and the way the holdout is being treated because of her own experience. She had once been a holdout juror herself. According to Hostin, the 1991 deliberations lasted nine days and grew heated. She said one juror threw a chair at her, but she gradually won the others over by questioning them point by point. The jury ultimately returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity in February 1991, even though most jurors had initially wanted to find Rakowitz guilty.
Hostin explained her reasoning on air, saying she “saw clearly that he was psychotic,” and that she believed he didn’t mean to kill Beerle and panicked afterward. The show even aired a clipping from The New York Times reporting that jurors said one holdout was principally responsible for preventing a guilty verdict. “That was me,” Hostin said.
Archival reporting appears to support her involvement, though with a twist. At the time, jurors told reporters that 10 panel members wanted to convict Rakowitz of murder, while two insisted he was mentally ill, and that the majority ultimately deferred to the two holdouts to avoid a hung jury. A Newsday article from the time named Hostin as one of those two.
