Sunny Hostin Claimed She Was the Rakowitz Holdout. 1991 Jurors Said Otherwise.

Adriana Stone 0 2 min read

Sunny Hostin Claimed She Was the Rakowitz Holdout. 1991 Jurors Said Otherwise.

Sunny Hostin is now claiming she was the lone holdout juror who kept Daniel Rakowitz, known as the Butcher of Tompkins Square Park, from going to prison. But that story appears to conflict with several accounts published immediately after the 1991 trial.

Hostin made the claim during a discussion on The View about the mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case. One juror in that Massachusetts case reportedly refused to support an insanity verdict. Hostin said she understood that juror because she had supposedly taken the same stand in the Rakowitz case.

Hostin said she wanted Rakowitz found not criminally responsible by reason of insanity. She described him as psychotic and said he did not intend to kill the victim before panicking and attempting to hide the crime. She also described the gruesome allegations that he chopped up, boiled, and fed body parts to unhoused people.

According to Hostin, the jury was sequestered for nine days. She said one juror became so angry that the person threw a chair at her. Hostin claimed she then persuaded the jurors one by one, asking questions until all 12 agreed on an insanity verdict. She said Rakowitz remains in a mental institution, where he is receiving treatment.

Hostin also said producers found her name in coverage of the case under her birth name, Asunción Cummings. She claimed that when reports mentioned a lone holdout who blocked a guilty verdict, the person they were describing was her.

Here is the clip that circulated with Hostin’s account:

Watch the clip on X.

The problem is that the contemporaneous accounts cited by The Post, Newsday, the Daily News, and the Associated Press described a different juror. Those reports identified the holdout as an unemployed man who wanted the deliberations to continue because he enjoyed the daily pay and free meals provided during jury service.

Juror Valerie Holmes gave Newsday a blunt description of the man: “He was unemployed and liked the $15 a day and the three free meals,” she said. “He liked that we were arguing on and on.” Holmes repeated the basic account to The Post and the Daily News, describing the holdout as a determined and manipulative man who wanted the jury to follow his position.

Jury forewoman Lois Markle also told the Associated Press that the same juror had pushed from the beginning for Rakowitz to be found not guilty by reason of mental disease. A law enforcement source from the time likewise told The Post that the holdout was a man.

Hostin was quoted as a juror in multiple reports from the period. However, the other jurors who spoke with reporters did not identify her as the holdout. Her own statement to Newsday, made under the name Asunción Cummings, also raises questions about her current version of events.

“We had to compromise. But it is obvious to me he butchered the body and he literally got away with murder. He attempted to commit the perfect crime,” Hostin told the paper at the time.

That statement does not match the image of a juror who single-handedly forced the panel to accept an insanity defense and then gradually won over every other member. The records described in the report instead point to an unemployed male juror as the person who delayed the verdict and pushed for the insanity finding.

Hostin’s position on the insanity defense is clear. Her account of the Rakowitz deliberations, however, is directly challenged by the jurors and reports cited from 1991. The result is a sharp conflict between her current retelling on television and the public accounts that emerged after the trial.

Source: The Gateway Pundit

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