On 22 September 2026, a daytime host told America she once flipped a murder jury toward insanity. The clip traveled as a boast. The 1991 record is quieter — and it does not match the Clancy holdout she used it to judge.
Tuesday’s episode of The View was supposed to be about a Massachusetts mistrial. Lindsay Clancy’s jury had split 11 to 1 on 4 September. Eleven members were ready to find her not criminally responsible in the deaths of her three children. One man would not join them. Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial. That is the live file, set out by the New York Times and the Associated Press.
Sunny Hostin, a former federal prosecutor on the ABC panel, said she believed Clancy met the old Massachusetts test. Then she reached for a story from before law school. She said she had been the holdout juror in the 1991 trial of Daniel Rakowitz, the East Village man the tabloids called the Butcher of Tompkins Square Park. A producer pulled a 1991 Times clip. Hostin read the line about one juror who blocked a guilty verdict. “That was me,” she said.
Joy Behar asked if this was the man who ate his victim. Hostin said yes. Alyssa Farah Griffin asked if she had “got this guy off.” Hostin answered that this is how much she believes in the insanity defense, and that he fed body parts to people living on the street. One panelist asked to move over. The clip is the one Nicholas Fondacaro posted the same day: the broadcast excerpt. Jesse Kelly and Joe Concha pushed it further into the right-hand feed: Kelly, Concha.
Mainstream write-ups treated the hour as a television surprise. Alternative feeds treated it as a confession of taste. Both skipped parts of the paper trail that sit in plain sight if you open the 1991 and 2004 files instead of the studio clock.
What the 1991 jury actually did
Monika Beerle was 26, a Swiss dance student in New York. On 19 August 1989 she died in an East Ninth Street apartment she shared with Rakowitz. He later told police a detailed account of the killing and of what he did with her remains. He left her skull in storage at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He talked in Tompkins Square Park. Someone went to the police. Those facts were in the papers then and are still in the Times report of 23 February 1991.
On 22 February 1991 a Manhattan jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity — New York’s phrase was not responsible because of mental disease or defect. Deliberations ran nine days. The verdict sheet had to be read more than once because of court mix-ups. Several jurors later told the Times that one holdout had been the main reason they did not come back with guilty. The paper named that juror: Asuncion Cummings. She is Sunny Hostin. Her quote in 1991 was already double-edged: “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.”
Read that twice. Even the holdout’s own sentence holds two ideas that sit poorly together. No intent to kill. Then a plan to hide the body and “commit the perfect crime.” Hostin on Tuesday stressed psychosis and panic. The 1991 quote she gave the Times also described after-the-fact calculation. A jury can still find disease. It cannot erase the tension inside its own words.
Rakowitz thanked the panel and offered to share a joint. He said he would rather go to prison than a hospital because he disliked medicine. The court sent him to a secure forensic hospital anyway. The jury hung on a side count about tampering with evidence. That count died as a mistrial. The murder count did not send him to a cell. It sent him to Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on Wards Island.
That last point is the first thing the phrase “got him off” hides. He was not released into the park. Reporting this week still places him at Kirby at 64. In 2004 a civil jury said he remained ill and needed hospital care, but voted 5–1 that he was not dangerous. The judge treated that danger finding as advice and kept him under the tighter label. The Times on 21 July 2004 and a later state decision in Matter of Rakowitz v Consilvio are the dry record. Thirty-five years in a locked hospital is not a street parade. It is also not a murder sentence with a date on the door.
“That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense.” — Sunny Hostin, The View, 22 September 2026, as transcribed in the New York Post and NBC News.
Two holdouts, two opposite jobs
Here is the hinge the studio talk blurred.
In 1991 Hostin was the one who would not vote guilty. She says she then “picked them off” until all twelve agreed he was not criminally responsible. A chair was thrown. Nine days passed. The room moved toward her.
In Plymouth in 2026 the holdout, named in later coverage as Michael Desronvil, would not vote that Lindsay Clancy lacked criminal responsibility. Eleven others would. The room did not move. The judge would not throw the man off the panel. The state’s high court would not stop the mistrial. By 21 September a fund for Desronvil had passed $350,000, according to TheGrio. Other jurors went on television and called him arrogant. He said, through a lawyer, that he had no such doubt and that the evidence showed she knew what she was doing.
Hostin used her old holdout to bless the insanity defense and to warn against treating a stubborn juror as a villain — while the Clancy holdout she was answering had blocked the very finding she wanted for Clancy. That is not a small mix-up. It is two different uses of the same word. One holdout saved a man from a guilty verdict. One holdout blocked a mother from an insanity verdict. Praising the first does not, by logic, indict or protect the second. It only shows that “holdout” is a tool. Direction matters.
Clancy, a former labor-and-delivery nurse, did not deny the acts that killed Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and infant Callan in January 2023. The fight was responsibility. Defense doctors described postpartum psychosis and a voice. Prosecutors described planning and knowledge of right and wrong. The public now argues about pills, sleep, and whether a mother can be both broken and blameworthy. That argument is older than this trial. It does not become settled because a talk-show juror once won a room in Manhattan.
What large desks soften, and what loud desks invent
Network recaps stress Hostin’s résumé and the shock on the couch. They note, if they have space, that Rakowitz is still confined. They rarely sit with Beerle as a person rather than a plot point. They rarely ask whether “he did not mean to kill her” survives his own later stories. In 2004 he told a hearing he had not killed her and then said he had. Recanting and confessing in the same decade is not a clean medical chart. It is a reason later judges kept the lock on.
Right-hand media used words Hostin did not use about herself: evil, proud, badge of honor. Some wrote that she “spared a cannibal from prison” as if the hospital were a holiday. Some flattened Clancy and Rakowitz into one morality play: if you believe in insanity at all, you believe in every horror. That is not how the defense is written. New York asked whether disease kept him from knowing or controlling the act. Massachusetts asked whether Clancy lacked criminal responsibility. Those tests can be met in one case and missed in another. A serious critic can still say Hostin’s tone on live television was tone-deaf. A serious defender can still say the law exists so juries may choose hospital over prison when the mind is gone.
The unfiltered middle is less useful to a clip. Hostin did sit on that jury. The Times did quote her under her birth name. The verdict did rest on insanity. The man did describe cooking and sharing remains. Homeless people in that park were pulled into a crime they did not choose. Beerle’s family received no murder sentence they could point to on a calendar. Rakowitz has not walked free. Clancy has not been acquitted. A new trial remains possible. Donors are paying a holdout’s bills. Other jurors say the public has the story wrong. None of that is a secret society. It is a country that cannot agree when a sick mind stops being a blameworthy will.
The medical file nobody wanted on a morning show
Insanity in court is not a feeling. It is a legal test laid over a medical story. Postpartum psychosis is rare and ugly. Reviews in psychiatric journals put it on the order of one or two cases per thousand births. When it comes, it can bring delusions and a break with the child’s safety. That is the defense world Clancy’s lawyers asked the jury to enter. It is not the same illness chart as a 1989 East Village world of street drugs, grand claims, and a man who called himself a kind of prophet. Lumping both under “psychosis” makes television. It makes poor medicine.
Capacity fights now sit in other rooms too — who may consent, who is too ill to choose death, who is too ill to stand a murder count. Planet Today has already tracked that edge in the Ontario MAiD dispute over a grandmother’s mind test and in the Bronx ruling that a mother was not responsible after her sons died. Those files are not Rakowitz. They are the same civic question: when does the state treat a mind as broken enough to change the ending? Readers who want the quieter body-science lane can start with what trials do and do not show about recovery chemistry and kitchen claims versus measured data. Courts borrow the language of illness. They do not inherit its caution.
Who pays for the story we prefer
Beerle cannot answer a daytime panel. The people who ate soup they did not understand cannot file a clean lawsuit from 1989. Clancy’s children cannot vote on the next jury. Hostin can. Desronvil can. Eleven unnamed people in Plymouth can. That imbalance is why the clip feels like a sport to people who never sat in either room.
If you think the insanity defense is a humane brake, Hostin’s 1991 vote is a case study in one juror slowing a rush to prison. You still have to live with what the man said he did after the killing, and with a hospital that has not found him safe to leave. If you think the defense is a loophole for the worst acts, the same vote is a case study in one strong personality moving eleven others. You still have to live with the fact that New York did not put him on a sidewalk. It put him behind a different kind of door, and a judge later refused to open it.
The Clancy mistrial does not settle which view is right. It only shows that one person can still stop twelve. Hostin once used that power in one direction and now faults a stranger for using it in the other. That is the part between the lines. Not a hidden order from a network. Not a midnight rite. A professional class that treats jury stubbornness as courage when it matches the preferred medicine, and as sabotage when it does not.
The next hard date in Massachusetts is the September 29 hearing the judge set after the mistrial. The next hard fact in New York is that the 1991 verdict still governs a man who has outlived the neighborhood that named him. Between those dates sits a clip, a fundraiser, and a country arguing about blame while two sets of dead people stay equally silent.
Latest news on this file: Sunny Hostin’s remarks on the 22 September 2026 episode of The View, reported 23 September by the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and NBC News. Broadcast clip circulated by Nicholas Fondacaro.
Primary older sources: Ronald Sullivan, “Man Acquitted of Killing and Boiling Roommate,” New York Times, 23 February 1991. Retention fight: Times, 21 July 2004; Matter of Rakowitz v Consilvio (2005). Clancy mistrial: AP, 4–5 September 2026.
Related Planet Today reading: Bronx Mother Not Responsible After Sons’ Deaths · Family Says Grandma Failed Mind Test, Then Got MAiD in Ontario · Vitamin C and Glutathione: What Trials Have Not Settled
Original date of this analysis: 24 September 2026. Core broadcast: 22 September 2026.
Note for fact checkers: Hostin’s identification as the 1991 holdout matches the Times naming of juror Asuncion Cummings and her own on-air claim; this article treats that match as well supported, not as a new leak. “Got off” is a studio phrase; the legal result was a hospital order, not a street release. This article does not claim Rakowitz walks free in 2026. It does not claim Clancy has been found insane or guilty; the September 4 result was a mistrial. Graphic details of the 1989 crime follow contemporaneous court and press accounts and are kept only as needed to explain why the clip landed. Online posts calling Hostin “evil” are reactions, not findings. Readers should watch the September 29 Clancy hearing and any later Kirby retention order before treating either file as closed.
Original article: Sunny Hostin Holdout Story: What the Jury Room Still Hides on Planet Today 🚀
Automatically republished from the main blog.