Joel Steinberg

Steinberg shared a Greenwich Village, Manhattan apartment at 14 West 10th St. with Lisa, Mitchell (a younger child also illegally adopted), and his live-in partner Hedda Nussbaum. Steinberg had reportedly been hired by a single mother named Michele Launders to locate a suitable adoptive family for Lisa, but he instead took the child home and raised her with Nussbaum. He never filed formal adoption papers and the child was not legally adopted.

On January 16, 2007, the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division (New York's intermediate appellate court) upheld a $15 million award against Steinberg to Michele Launders, Lisa's birth mother. In its opinion, the court rejected the position that Steinberg, acting as his own attorney, put forth:

After his release, Steinberg moved to Harlem, where he took up work in the construction industry. As of 2006, he maintained his innocence. Mitchell was reunited with his biological mother, Nicole Bridget Smigiel.

On two occasions, Steinberg was denied discretionary parole, mainly because he never expressed remorse for the killing. However, on June 30, 2004, he was paroled under the state's "good time" law, which mandates release of inmates who exhibit good behavior while incarcerated after having served two-thirds or more of the maximum possible sentence. New York State has since increased this ratio to six-sevenths of the maximum term for persons convicted of violent felonies. Steinberg had spent most of his imprisonment at New York State's supermax prison, the Southport Correctional Facility, presumably to prevent him from being attacked by other inmates.

Steinberg was under the influence of crack cocaine when he hit Lisa on the head on November 1, 1987. After the attack, he left the apartment to party with friends; Nussbaum eventually dialed 9-1-1. After police arrived at the scene, Lisa was transported from the apartment to Saint Vincent's Hospital. The child remained in the hospital for three days and died after being removed from life support. In addition to Joel's deadly assault of Lisa, Mitchell and Nussbaum both showed signs of physical abuse at the hands of Steinberg, and Nussbaum's battered, unkempt appearance did much to fuel the media frenzy that accompanied the story of Lisa's death.

Joel Steinberg was raised in the Bronx and Yonkers, New York. After graduating from Fordham University in 1962, he attended New York University Law School, but was dropped in 1964 and joined the U.S. Air Force in the following year. Following his military career, he returned to law school and was admitted to the bar in New York. Due to the ongoing Vietnam War, lawyers whose studies were interrupted by conscription were exempted from the bar exam requirement, if they met certain requirements.

Joel Steinberg (born May 25, 1941) is a disbarred New York City criminal defense attorney who attracted international media attention when he was accused of rape and murder and was convicted of manslaughter, in the November 1, 1987, beating and subsequent death of a six-year-old girl, Elizabeth ("Lisa"), whom he and his live-in partner Hedda Nussbaum had illegally adopted.