Americans from coast to coast, and several of her own cohosts on The View, sat in a kind of civic astonishment this week as Sunny Hostin volunteered, on national television, that she had been the holdout juror who kept Daniel Rakowitz—the man remembered as the Butcher of Tompkins Square Park—out of prison. In 1989 Rakowitz murdered his roommate, the Swiss dancer Monika Beerle, then dismembered her, boiled the remains, and served them to the homeless in the park. Hostin, speaking of the 1991 trial and of her own part in it, described the sequence without flinching: once he killed her, he chopped up her body parts, yes, boiled her body parts, and fed her body parts to the unhoused. She presented this not as a confession of error but as proof of how deeply she believes in the insanity defense. Alyssa Farah Griffin’s reaction—“And you got this guy off?”—was the sound of a table discovering, live, what its colleague had done.

The country is entitled to ask what kind of moral education is being offered when a woman who steered a jury away from a guilty verdict in that case now sits every morning as a licensed authority on law, womanhood, and public virtue. Hostin did not merely recall the facts; she recited them with the pride of a convert who had “picked them off,” one juror after another, until all twelve voted not criminally responsible. A chair was thrown at her in the deliberation room. She treats that as a badge. The New York Times of 1991 already identified the holdout as Asunción Cummings. She is that juror. The program that employs her now treats the revelation as colorful biography rather than as a standing question about judgment.

The question that must be confronted is not whether the insanity defense exists. It is how a person who still speaks of boiling and feeding a murdered woman as the measure of her own enlightenment is permitted to address a daily audience of American women as if her instincts were the nation’s. Television does not merely report opinion; it trains it. When the trainer’s proudest legal memory is the acquittal of a man who cooked a roommate and ladled her into soup for the destitute, the audience is being instructed in something other than mercy. It is being instructed in a hierarchy of feeling in which the killer’s psychosis outranks the victim’s body. That hierarchy now has a morning slot, a studio, and a cohost who will not leave the table. The country has noticed. The cohosts noticed. The remaining question is whether anyone with the power to decide what airs will notice as well.

Additional ADNN Articles: 

Hosts Of "The View" Think Minorities And Women Unable To Get Legal ID
Gilgo Architect Rex Heuermann Pleads Guilty to 8 Murders
LaGuardia MANPADS Terror Alert Shakes Delta Flight 2604 Night Landing
A New Meme Format Is Born From Midtown Shooting