Sunny Hostin brags about being a holdout juror that prevented The Butcher of Thompson Square Park from going to prison.
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) September 22, 2026
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
Sunny Hostin shocked her co-hosts on Tuesday’s episode of The View by revealing that she was the holdout juror who stopped a Manhattan jury from convicting Daniel Rakowitz, the East Village killer cannibal known as the Butcher of Tompkins Square Park.
Rakowitz killed a woman, dismembered her, ate her, and claims to have fed parts of her remains to homeless people.
The women were discussing the Lindsay Clancy mistrial in Massachusetts, where one juror refused an insanity verdict in the case of the mother who brutally strangled her three children to death.
Hostin said she wanted Clancy to be found not guilty by reason of insanity.
“The reason I felt so strongly about this holdout juror is because I was a holdout juror in the Daniel Rakowitz case. I don’t know if people remember it, the Butcher of Tompkins Square Park,” Hostin said.
Joy Behar asked, “The guy who ate the victims?”
Alyssa Farah Griffin said, “You got this guy off?!”
“That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense. He fed her body parts to the unhoused,” Hostin explained. “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. I said, ‘What about this? What about that?’ We ended up, all 12, unanimously voting that he was not criminally responsible on reason of insanity. He is still in a mental institution being treated. That’s a different type of prison, and he’s being treated because he’s sick.”
