Word: steinberger
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Every year in the U.S. more than 1,000 children die from physical abuse, but Lisa Steinberg is the one whose name is stamped in the public mind. Though her short, unhappy life of six years was spent in a middle-class Manhattan household, it was in circumstances of stunning callousness and squalor. Joel Steinberg, 47, the disbarred attorney who illegally adopted her, spent days at a time in a cocaine stupor. His live-in companion Hedda Nussbaum, 46, was a former children's book editor with a boxer's dented profile, the result of years of beatings by Steinberg...
Last week a Manhattan jury found Steinberg guilty of first-degree manslaughter, which carries a prison term of 8 1/3 to 25 years. Though the jurors emerged from eight days of deliberation with plans for a reunion, they reached their compromise verdict only after some heated quarrels. Most of them entered the jury room believing Steinberg was guilty. Some wanted to convict him on the more serious charge of second-degree murder. But four holdouts were convinced that it was Nussbaum who caused the brain injuries that killed Lisa, a claim raised by Steinberg's attorneys late...
...decision on whether to convict Steinberg of murder or manslaughter hinged upon fine distinctions of intent and responsibility. The murder charge would have required the jury to find Steinberg guilty of "depraved indifference to human life." There certainly seemed to be evidence of that. After being pounded into unconsciousness, Lisa was left lying on a bathroom floor in the couple's Greenwich Village apartment for some twelve hours when Steinberg went out to dinner. Nussbaum testified that after his return, when she told him the girl could not be revived, he insisted they free-base cocaine before calling for help...
...jury concluded that Steinberg's drug use -- he had been smoking cocaine continually for days before the fatal beating -- made him incapable of realizing the seriousness of Lisa's condition. With what seems a measure of inconsistency, however, the jury saw the same failure to get immediate medical assistance as evidence of Steinberg's "intent" to do serious bodily harm to Lisa, an important element of the manslaughter charge...
Considering that the Steinberg story took precedence over the Reagan-Gorbachev summit, the RJR-Nabisco corporate buyout, then-Secretary of State George Schultz's refusal to grant PLO leader Yasir Arafat a visa and the electoral victory of Benazir Bhutto '73 in Pakistan, can we believe that Newsweek had anything in mind except appealing to our "most primitive fascinations...