Steinberg Convicted in Girl’s Death : Jury Returns Manslaughter Verdict, Rejects Murder Count

After eight days of deliberation in a case that has become a national symbol of family violence, a jury Monday acquitted disbarred lawyer Joel Steinberg of murder in the death of the 6-year-old girl he had illegally adopted but found him guilty of intentionally causing her death.

The first-degree manslaughter conviction carries a prison term of 8 1/3 to 25 years. It was the second most serious of the four charges against Steinberg in connection with the November, 1987, death of his daughter, Elizabeth.

In rejecting the second-degree murder charge against Steinberg, the jury apparently gave little weight to the testimony of his live-in lover of 12 years, Hedda Nussbaum, a former editor of children’s books, who recounted a story of nightmarish abuse at the hands of a man she said she had worshiped.

“We almost ignored Hedda’s testimony,” Helena Barthell, one of the jurors, said.

Steinberg had not taken the stand himself.

Jury foreman Jeremiah Cole said that a majority of the jurors had initially been inclined to convict Steinberg of second-degree murder, but “it became apparent some jurors would never vote guilty on (that) count.” Thus, he said, some who had favored the murder count switched their votes to avoid becoming a hung jury.

State Supreme Court Justice Harold Rothwax had instructed the jury that it could hold Steinberg guilty of murder only if it were satisfied that he had shown “depraved indifference” toward the child and her survival.

Ira London, Steinberg’s attorney, said his client planned to appeal but added that “the jury rendered a verdict that does bespeak justice.”

Steinberg stared straight ahead as the verdict was read, showing no visible emotion. Sentencing was set for March 8.

After 12 weeks of testimony from more than 50 witnesses, Steinberg emerged as arguably the most reviled figure in New York. Mayor Edward I. Koch went so far as to call the 47-year-old Steinberg “a monster” who should be “boiled in oil.”

However, the issues raised during the trial reached far beyond the violence that led to Elizabeth Steinberg’s death or the battering that Nussbaum endured. The trial put new and wider focus on child abuse and family violence, and on the question of whose responsibility it is to stop it.

“Now the outrage goes beyond the fact that a parent did this to (the issue of) where was the system? Where were the neighbors?” said Ann Harris Cohn, executive director of the National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse.

Elizabeth Steinberg was one of an estimated 1,200 children to die of abuse or neglect in the United States during 1987. Initial tallies of last year’s statistics indicate that the 1988 national death toll will be even higher, Cohn said.

Brother Tethered

Around dawn on Nov. 2, 1987, emergency medical personnel were summoned to Steinberg’s Greenwich Village address--a building where Mark Twain once lived--on a report of a choking child. Inside the filthy apartment, they found the bruised, comatose body of Elizabeth, known as Lisa. Her 16-month-old brother, Mitchell, also adopted illegally, was tethered in his urine-soaked playpen. (The boy has since been returned to his biological mother.)

Four days later, Lisa died of blows that a doctor subsequently would liken to the impact of a fall from a three-story building.

Nussbaum, 46, had originally been implicated along with Steinberg in the death of the child they had raised together. However, prosecutors dropped charges against her, saying she was so beaten down--emotionally and physically--that she had been powerless to stop Steinberg.

Steinberg’s lawyers, on the other hand, said it was Nussbaum who had struck the fatal blows, because she considered the first-grader a rival for Steinberg’s affection. They accused Nussbaum of lying about Steinberg to protect herself.

During the week it deliberated, the jury repeatedly asked to be read parts of the often-conflicting medical testimony.

The medical evidence apparently was important in the jury’s finding that Steinberg had intentionally allowed Lisa to die, which was critical to the manslaughter conviction.

Nussbaum said she did not see Steinberg strike Lisa on the night she was fatally beaten but that he had handed her the child’s limp body before going out to a business dinner.

Medical experts had previously testified that Lisa might have survived if she had received medical treatment sooner. Nussbaum said she did not summon help earlier because she feared it would seem disloyal to Steinberg and because she believed that he had special powers to heal the child himself.

Speaking in flat, almost detached tones from the witness stand, Nussbaum gave grisly accounts of the beatings that Steinberg inflicted, and prosecutors supported her testimony with graphic videotapes that police had taken of her body when the couple were arrested.

Judge Rothwax described Nussbaum as an accomplice. He cautioned jurors that the fact that Steinberg beat her is “no proof whatsoever” that he killed his adopted daughter.

Testimony by other witnesses indicated that there were signs that should have alerted Lisa’s teachers and neighbors, as well as the police, to the hellish life that she was living. One of Lisa’s student teachers, for example, testified that she had noticed a black eye and bruises on the child but that her reports to school officials had never been followed up.

Lisa Steinberg’s death has also raised new questions about whether it is too easy for parents to adopt children without going through established agencies. One of those who regularly attended the trial was Michelle Launders, Lisa’s biological mother.

As an unwed 19-year-old, Launders had paid Steinberg $500 to arrange an adoption for her newborn baby girl. Instead, he kept the baby and never registered the adoption with a court.