Wallace

FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND

One summer evening in Fresno, Anthony LeRoy Wallace’s wife of two months, Arlissa Pointer Wallace, caught him smoking crack cocaine, called him a crack head, and told him to leave the house she had bought six or seven years before the marriage and had refinanced shortly after the marriage. Although she had kept the house in her name, Wallace presumably had acquired a small community property interest through mortgage payments with community property funds.

Instead of leaving, however, Wallace began tearing up the house. Frightened, Pointer kept her distance from him as she opened the living room curtains in the hope a neighbor might see and call the police. He kept breaking things. Twice she dialed 911, but twice she hung up, fearing things would get much worse if he knew she had called. He left before the police arrived. She told a police officer that the only thing he had not broken in the house was his own stereo and that everything else in the house belonged to her. A couple of hours later, alerted by a neighbor to “incredible pounding, very, very loud noise” from the house, police officers found Wallace inside the house breaking…