Lawyer Sentenced to 6 Years in Prison

A once-prominent attorney was sentenced to six years in prison Wednesday and ordered to pay nearly $1 million in fines and restitution for embezzling almost $300,000 from the sons of a dead police officer.

In sentencing Angela Fawn Wallace, 42, to a term that is close to the maximum, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Samuel Mayerson rejected the tearful pleas of her 7-year-old son to put her on probation.

Mayerson said she used charm and guile while “engaging in a continuous pattern of malpractice.”

Wallace, a USC law school graduate, was convicted Dec. 18 after a four-week jury trial of forgery, perjury and stealing more than $294,000 from Howard Byrdsong, 20, and his 18-year-old brother, Jontrae.

She was representing them at the time and trying to help them collect on a life insurance policy on their mother, who died of cancer.

Timothy Mack, 47, a co-defendant in the December trial, also was convicted. He was sentenced earlier this year to six years in prison.

The Byrdsong brothers were killed in a shooting in mid-2001 that is still under investigation by the Inglewood Police Department.

Police have said Wallace is a suspect.

At the sentencing Wednesday, Mayerson ordered Wallace to pay $294,952 in restitution to the Byrdsong estate plus fines of about $600,000.

During the hearing, her lawyer, Milton Grimes, urged Mayerson to put her on probation because he said that Wallace has a long history of doing charitable work and that she has been punished for her misdeeds.

“She has fallen from grace,” he said.

Wallace’s son, Justin, told Mayerson that “a mother and her son need to be together. It’s not fair that I have to keep sending her letters. Why can’t we just talk to each other?” he asked. He broke into tears as he said, “I love her and I need her.”

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Ron Goudy said Wallace has never shown remorse for her actions.

“She had the opportunity today to admit that she was wrong, but she didn’t own up to her responsibility,” he said. “She deserves as much time as this court can give her.”

The maximum term was seven years and four months.

Before imposing sentence, Mayerson said Wallace had been disciplined by the State Bar of California several times and was not even a lawyer when she represented the brothers.

While representing them, Wallace received a $380,000 insurance check in August 2000. She used part of the money for the brothers’ benefit, Goudy said.

But she also opened a bank account to access their money using a forged power of attorney and then wrote a number of checks to herself, her law firm, to cash and to others, Goudy said.

In 1998, Wallace pleaded no contest in State Bar Court to seven counts of professional misconduct, including writing 16 unauthorized checks on the trust account of a Santa Monica retiree days after he died. She was suspended from law practice for two years.

She is awaiting trial on separate criminal charges that she induced a friend to impersonate a business associate and lie under oath at a State Bar disciplinary hearing in a failed attempt to save her license to practice law.