Steinberg Disbarred Over Law Exam Exemption
Steinberg Disbarred Over Law Exam Exemption
By E. R. SHIPP
LEAD: Joel B. Steinberg, the lawyer charged in the beating death of the 6-year-old girl he had helped raise, was disbarred yesterday.
Joel B. Steinberg, the lawyer charged in the beating death of the 6-year-old girl he had helped raise, was disbarred yesterday.
In a 4-to-1 ruling, the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Manhattan found that Mr. Steinberg did not meet requirements set by the Court of Appeals for an exemption from taking the bar examination when he applied for one 18 years ago. It also found that he had misled the State Board of Law Examiners, which issued the exemption, and the Committee on Character and Fitness, an arm of the Appellate Division that screens and approves lawyers for admission to the bar.
Under the Court of Appeals rules, law students whose studies were interrupted by military service could, upon graduation, be exempted from taking the bar examination. But, under the rules, one had to have left law school for military service after completing two-thirds of the courses required for graduation.
Mr. Steinberg, 46 years old, had completed two years of law school at N. Y. U. when he was ''dropped for poor scholarship'' in May 1964, according to school records contained in the court file.
Those records indicate that Mr. Steinberg had earned barely one-third of the credits required for graduation because he had failed a number of courses. After working for 11 months, Mr. Steinberg entered the Air Force. When he was discharged in March 1968, he held the rank of first lieutenant. He then returned to N. Y. U. and graduated in February 1970.
The fact that he did not qualify for the exemption went undetected until Mr. Steinberg was arrested last November in the murder of Lisa Steinberg, the child that he and his companion, Hedda Nussbaum, raised from birth. The flaw in his application was discovered by Harold J. Reynolds, the chief clerk of the Appellate Division, who, acting on a hunch, had decided to read through Mr. Steinberg's file. Barely three weeks after Lisa's death, the Departmental Disciplinary Committee, another arm of the Appellate Division, began disbarment proceedings. One Dissenting Justice
Mr. Steinberg, who is being held on Rikers Island, has maintained that the court did not have the authority to disbar him and that he should not be disbarred without a hearing.
The court's lone dissenter, Justice George Bundy Smith, agreed that there should be a hearing. But the majority - Presiding Justice Francis T. Murphy and Justices Joseph P. Sullivan, David Ross and Ernst H. Rosenberger - said it was not unfair to take ''a drastic step'' of disbarring Mr. Steinberg without a hearing ''if the requirements of a high moral character and fitness to practice law are to have any meaning for future applicants.'' Two Letters
What seemed to sway the majority were two letters, both dated Feb. 6, 1970, written by Charles L. Knapp, a professor of contracts and commercial law, who was then acting associate dean of the N. Y. U. Law School.
In a carefully worded letter to the Board of Bar Examiners, Professor Knapp seemed to state that Mr. Steinberg met all the academic qualifications for the exemption. But in a letter to Mr. Steinberg, he pointed out that he did not tell the bar examiners ''in so many words that you had completed two-thirds of the graduation requirements prior to your entry in the Armed Services.'' He went on to say that if the bar examiners pressed him on the point, ''I should, of course, have to respond.''
In an interview yesterday, Professor Knapp, a member of the N. Y. U. faculty for 24 years, said he regretted that no one from the disciplinary committee had contacted him for his explanation of the letters. The letter to the board, he said, ''was written to state facts which would have allowed the board, if it had chosen to apply its own rule leniently, to grant him the exemption.'' But the letter to Mr. Steinberg, he said, ''was to make it very clear that we were not going to make any misrepresentations to the board and that if we were questioned, we were going to answer them frankly and accurately.''