For Freed Prisoner, It’s a New World Out There

On Marva Joyce Wallace’s first day of freedom Saturday, it wasn’t the price of the four JC Penney bra-and-panty sets that struck her as strange.

It was the money.

Standing at a department store checkout counter, she stared for a second at $100 and $5 bills in her hands. When change, in the form of 52 cents, arrived, she fumbled again.

The quarters confused her. The bills had a new, off-center design.

“It’s strange--everything looks so different,” said Wallace, 48, who has spent most of the last 17 years at the California Institution for Women in Corona after being convicted of killing her abusive husband in 1985.

On Friday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David S. Wesley overturned her murder conviction and released her from prison. He ruled that the outcome of Wallace’s trial might have been different had battered women’s syndrome been allowed to be used in her defense.

Wallace is believed to be the first inmate released under a new California law that allows inmates to file habeas corpus petitions in cases in which evidence of the syndrome was not permitted at trial. She may still, however, face a new trial.

Wallace, who is called Joyce by her family, spent Saturday surrounded by aunts and cousins, brothers and sisters and the many nieces and nephews who were born during her imprisonment. Neighbors and friends arrived in a steady stream, many of them within minutes of hearing or reading of Wallace’s release.

“I couldn’t wait,” said Gloria Davis, a church friend of the family, as she leaped from her car to give Wallace a hug. Davis, wearing all black except for an animal print hat tilted at an angle, said she had been on her way to a funeral when she heard the news on the radio. “I stopped the car and said, ‘Thank you, Jesus.’ I almost got in an accident.”

Wallace started the morning with a pancake breakfast at her mother’s home on 102nd Street in Los Angeles. Then, dressed in an off-white shirt and khaki cargo pants that she had borrowed from a niece, she went on a mini shopping spree at a nearby mall.

Underwire bras were a priority: They had been forbidden inside the prison. Skirts and dresses in earth tones were also on the list -- anything that would be different from the jeans and gray T-shirt that had long been her uniform.

As Wallace called out her sizes to her mother, Deloris Wallace, and aunt, Julia Richardson, the three women plucked items off shelves with glee. “It’s your day,” said Deloris, as Joyce wondered whether she should buy a black or brown purse.

She went with the brown.

Upstairs, in Penney’s lingerie section, she picked out three sets of matching bras and underwear, in leopard print, purple and royal blue, “my favorite color.”

Strolling the aisles of a boutique, she chose a long-sleeve tan sweater and a matching calf-length skirt. She paid for the items without ever bothering to try them on -- a sign, perhaps, that she is accepting her newfound freedom.

She can always exchange.

As the women walked through the mall, Wallace marveled at how much the place had changed. It was a theme that ran throughout the day. “Everything seems much bigger now,” she said.

The tree in front of her mother’s house “was a little stub when I left.” Now, it reaches far above the garage of the stuccoed house.

“I said, ‘Honey, there’ve been so many changes,’ ” confided her mother. “She’s just getting used to the scenery.”

Wallace had learned that morning how to operate a cordless telephone. She said she would soon learn to ride the Green and Blue lines and drive the Century Freeway, which had sprung up near her mother’s house. Accustoming herself to a world with blue Pepsi and juice bottles shaped like superheroes might take longer.

But it was easy, she said, to slip back into her role as sister, daughter and niece. In prison, weekends had been a lonely blur of laundry and television, a small relief from the long hours that Wallace put in working construction for the Inmate Day Labor Service. She learned how to crochet, make ceramics and build baskets out of pine needles and palm fronds.

She rarely saw her children, who were 3 and 7 when she was convicted. Her favorite grandmother died while she was in prison.

Within two months of her marriage to Glendell Boykin, she said, he began beating her, often for being absent from the home and after visits by relatives. She testified Oct. 10 that she felt there was no way to escape. “He told me if I ever tried to leave him again he would kill me.”

She shot him to death and was sentenced to a first-degree murder sentence of 27 years to life. Two weeks ago, Gov. Gray Davis denied Wallace parole, reversing a recommendation of the state Board of Prison Terms. Wallace said she expected the governor’s decision, “especially now, with the elections. He wasn’t going to let anyone out.”

The law allowing abused women to petition the court went into effect in 2001. It was “what I was waiting for,” she said Saturday.

On her first day of freedom, Wallace said she was learning how to be a grandmother to Deon, 4, the son of her son, Jessie Martin. Deon rarely visited her in prison. As he rode a red-and-white bicycle with training wheels in a tight circle around Deloris Wallace’s driveway, Joyce kept a protective eye trained on him.

“She blended in yesterday like it was the day before” the slaying that sent her to prison, said sister Andrea Wallace, 37.

For most of Joyce’s imprisonment, Andrea said, the family often told people that she was living out of town or working as a stewardess. Her return, Andrea said, has helped to heal a family that has never quite been the same since what mother Deloris calls “the accident.”

“What she went through, I went through,” said sister Ruby Wallace, 38, who visited Joyce two or three times a month, as often as she was allowed by the prison.

She said she took her sister family pictures and kept her up to date on current events and changes within their large family. “I told her I’d be with her till the end.... I figured, if she can go through it in there, I can make it out here, with everything that’s going on.”

There were moments, throughout the day, when Joyce Wallace reached out to grab her younger sister and hold her tight.

At those times, there were more tears than words to share.

“I still don’t know how to feel,” Wallace said at one point.

There is still some uncertainty in her future; she is due back in court Monday.

The district attorney’s office said Friday that it had not decided whether to try her case again.

Wallace’s attorney, Michael Brennan, told The Times that he expected the two sides to settle without a trial.

Wallace was certainly making plans, however, for the rest of her life.

After years working construction as an inmate, making 95 cents an hour, she said she’s entertaining two more-lucrative job offers, one as a plumber and the other working for a delivery service.

She also hopes to spend time serving as an advocate for other battered women.

“I didn’t know about shelters or hotlines,” she said. “I was all alone.... I didn’t know any other way. If I can prevent that, I’m more than happy to do it.”

But before any of that, she has a more pressing engagement, one she hopes the judge will allow her to attend.

Her daughter, Keshawna, who was 3 when she left for prison, will be married Nov. 9 in North Carolina.

Wallace is hoping to walk her daughter down the aisle.