I feel like America needs a Sunny Hostin-sitter. You know, it’s like a babysitter, housesitter, or petsitter: You can’t be around them all the time, but you need someone to keep an eye on them, or else bad things are going to happen.
Heaven knows I can’t keep my eyes on “The View” like I can keep them on my kids and my dogs. Not only is the flibbertigibbet-fest way less important to me, there’s also way more inchoate screaming and barking involved. When you’ve got two preschoolers, why do you need Joy Behar and Alyssa Farah Griffin going “Road House” on one another to make your day that much more chaotic?
Make no mistake, though: Someone does need to really watch Sunny. Last I checked in with her for some kind of weird viral clip involving her and her show, she was going on a prolonged rant about how her smut “beach-read” novels for “exploring black joy and Latina joy” weren’t being adapted into Hollywood movies, thus depriving black and brown actors of roles. Hence, she was working with an AI company to adapt the movie using artificial actors … thus depriving black and brown actors of roles. Sound logic, that.
I thought that was more than enough outré Sunny Hostin for one month, at least. If America doesn’t need itself a Hostin-sitter, she should have been good until at least the middle of October for another peek into what she’s been up to. But that was just last week. And now here we are with the former sex crimes prosecutor and legal pundit telling her fellow panelists on “The View” that she was the holdout juror in another high-profile case, just like the Lindsay Clancy trial.
In that case, she said, she helped eventually seal an acquittal for New York City’s most infamous cannibal, Daniel Rakowitz. A teensy bit less noble, I think you’ll concur.
For those of you not acquainted with the case, from The New York Times, Feb. 23, 1991:
A Manhattan jury found an East Village man not guilty by reason of insanity yesterday for killing and dismembering his roommate after she tried to throw him out of her apartment.
Is it time to finally put the show out of its misery and cancel “The View”?
Yes: 100% (7 Votes)
No: 0% (0 Votes)
After nine days of deliberations, the jury concluded that Daniel Rakowitz, a 30-year-old dishwasher and self-styled marijuana guru, suffered from mental disease or defect and thus was not criminally responsible for the Aug. 19, 1989 murder of Monika Beerle, whose skull he left in the baggage room at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in a bucket of kitty litter.
After jurors returned their verdict yesterday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Rakowitz thanked them and said, “I hope someday we can smoke a joint together.”
That’s the PG-13 version of the story, too. Rakowitz boiled his victim’s body into a soup which he served to homeless people, as the New York Post noted.
In discussing the Clancy case, the 57-year-old Hostin made this all about herself again — although, to be fair, this is considerably more interesting than her dumb AI soft-porn movie deal.
As for Clancy, “I thought absolutely she was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity. And the reason I felt that — I feel so strongly about this holdout juror is because I was a holdout juror in a case in the Daniel Rakowitz case. I don’t know if people remember it, ‘The Butcher of Thompkins Square Park,’” Hostin said.
“The guy who ate the victims?” a disbelieving Behar asked.
“When I brought it up at the hot topics meeting, I don’t think everyone believed me,” Hostin responded. “And my producer looked it up and I’m in The New York Times and apparently, ‘several jurors questioned afterwards said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict.’ That was me. And it was because I saw clearly that he was psychotic.”
And yeah, that’s actually true. From the New York Times article:
“We don’t think he intended to kill her,” said a juror, Asuncion Cummings. “But once he did, he dismembered her body in an effort to commit the perfect crime.”
That’s Hostin’s real first name and real maiden name. She would have been in her early 20s at the time, so she clearly she’s felt strongly for a long time about basically finding people not guilty by reason of insanity — even if they’re legitimate monsters.
The flabbergasted reaction from her co-hosts said it all:
Sunny Hostin brags about being a holdout juror that prevented The Butcher of Thompson Square Park from going to prison.
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— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) September 22, 2026
Hostin does call the effort by Lindsey Clancy’s defense attorney to investigate the holdout juror “despicable.” pic.twitter.com/ekk2niLG52
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) September 22, 2026
Maybe America’s needed a Sunny Hostin-sitter for 35 years now and we’ve just never known it. Unless, of course, we saw a New York Times article and realized that any holdout juror who thought a cannibal who called himself the “God of Marijuana” was not responsible for murder by reason of insanity was a little bit nutty herself.
To be fair, the Rakowitz case differs from the Clancy case in that the verdict didn’t so much change his sentence so much as where he was serving it. As of the last time the media reported on his attempts to be released, in 2010, WNBC-TV said that Rakowitz would remain in the maximum security facility at the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center.
“He periodically has the right to petition for transfer to a less secure facility which prosecutors have successfully opposed through the years, their latest objection just upheld by the state Supreme Court,” the station reported.
The issue with Clancy being found not guilty by reason of insanity is that her attorneys are arguing that the condition that caused her to kill her three children is postpartum psychosis. By its very nature, that’s transient, which means once she’s properly medicated for any other conditions she might have, there’s no legal reason to keep her in state custody.
This is why the case attracted so much publicity in the first place: that, plus Massachusetts’ inverted standard on burden of proof on insanity pleas, made her case unique in a horrifying way. Most killers who are found not guilty by reason of insanity only change the venue, not generally the length, of the sentence. (Rakowitz, for what it’s worth, said during the trial that he preferred prison to a mental hospital because he didn’t want to be medicated. Unless it was with weed, one assumes.)
But I digress.
“That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense. He fed her body parts to the unhoused,” Hostin said. “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.”
Yeah, one can see how that juror felt. Not that I endorse violence, mind you. Just Hostin-sitting, 24/7. The woman seems to need it.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
