When Sonny Hostin of The View claimed this week that she was a holdout juror in the case of the "Butcher of Tompkins Square Park" back in 1991, it was horrifying and shocking because she was bragging about it.
Even her co-hosts couldn’t believe it.
"I feel so strongly about this holdout juror because I was a holdout juror in a case, in the Daniel Rakowitz case," Hostin told her co-hosts.
She said it with pride, as if she had helped free a wrongly accused man. Rakowitz, who killed Monika Beerle, cut up her body, made soup out of it, and fed it to homeless people, escaped a murder conviction when a New York City jury returned an insanity verdict in February 1991. Hostin now casts herself as the brave juror who recognized his psychosis and refused to budge. The newspapers that covered the verdict tell a very different story, and none of it flatters her.
Start with the New York Times.
Its Feb. 23, 1991, report said one holdout juror bore most of the responsibility for blocking a guilty verdict. The paper didn't name that juror, but it did quote a panelist named Asuncion Cummings. That's Hostin. Asunción is her real first name, and Cummings is her maiden name.
"We don't think he intended to kill her. But once he did, he dismembered her body in an effort to commit the perfect crime," Cummings told the Times.
The New York Daily News covered the same verdict that same day and identified the holdout as a man. Juror Valerie Holmes had little patience for him. She told the paper he "wanted to collect his $15 a day" fee and was "very determined, very manipulative and he didn't mind how long he stayed there."
"He was sane enough to get rid of the evidence. The horror - the chopping - was insane," Holmes said of Rakowitz.
Jury forewoman Lois Markle sounded even less sure of the outcome. "After days and days of heated debate, we reached a very, very hard decision. I'm not sure it's correct," she told the Daily News.
The Associated Press backed that account. According to the AP, the jury deliberated for nine days before a single holdout won a battle of wills with everyone else in the room. Markle didn't hide who drove it.
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"From day one, this particular person was determined that the jury was going to find Rakowitz not guilty by reason of mental disease," Markle told the AP. Holmes added that the holdout was an unemployed man who dragged out deliberations to keep collecting his $15 daily juror fee.
Then there's Newsday, the one outlet that puts Hostin in the holdout camp. It reported that ten jurors wanted to convict Rakowitz of murder, while two insisted he was mentally ill and not responsible for Beerle's death. The majority caved to avoid a hung jury. Newsday named Hostin as one of the two holdouts, and Holmes described the other one to the paper.
"He was unemployed and liked the $15 a day and the three free meals. He liked that we were arguing on and on," Holmes said.
So even in Hostin's best-case scenario, she was one of two, and her fellow jurors pinned the whole stalemate on a guy angling for free lunches. That hardly qualifies as a profile in courage.
When she bragged about being a holdout juror in the case, she cited a New York Times article at the time that described a lone holdout who "was principally responsible … for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict."
"That was me," Hostin said. "And it was because I saw clearly that he was psychotic."
But here's the problem. Here’s what Hostin herself said back then.
"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," she told Newsday.
Something doesn’t add up.
Hostin claims she was a true believer in his insanity who saw his psychosis when nobody else would.
What baffles me most is the motive. It makes no sense that she would brag about being a holdout juror in that case, and now it appears she was, at the very least, exaggerating, if not completely lying about it. She wants credit for helping a man who dismembered a woman avoid a murder conviction, and she's rewriting her own role to get it.
Why would she do that?
The left has a warped idea of what counts as a proud moment.