Convicted of robbery for grabbing a cell phone from his wife after attacking her, Jose Aguilera argued, through his lawyer, that it couldn’t have been robbery because the phone, which he had purchased, was community property — jointly owned –and he’d intended to keep it only temporarily.

Nice try.

Upholding Aguilera’s conviction, the Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles said Thursday that a spouse who takes property by “force or fear,” and intends to deprive the other spouse of a major portion of its value or use, commits robbery even if it’s community property.

The case dates from August 2014, when Aguilera and Angelica Avila, his wife of six years, got into an argument after attending a party together. According to Avila’s statement to officers — which she tried to recant at Aguilera’s trial — she ran to their car, and he ran after her, started to choke her and demanded her phone. She said she broke free, got in the car and locked the door, but he broke a window and tried to pull her out. The court said bystanders intervened and pulled Aguilera off, but he was able to take her phone from her purse. Officers said they found him talking on the phone a block away.

Prosecutors said Aguilera had attacked his wife in the past and taken her cell phone to keep her from calling the police. A Los Angeles County jury rejected a felony domestic violence charge but convicted him of misdemeanor battery as well as the felony charge of robbery, and he was sentenced to a year in jail.

Aguilera’s appeal relied on another appellate court’s 1997 ruling that overturned a husband’s conviction of vehicle theft for driving off with his wife’s car after an argument and keeping it for three days until police caught up with him. Although the couple in that case considered it the wife’s car, the court said it had been bought during the marriage and thus was presumably community property. Under California law, the 1997 court said, theft occurs only when a co-owner takes property with the intent to keep it permanently.

But robbery, as the court in Aguilera’s case explained, is a different type of crime — it requires proof that property was taken from someone by “force or fear.”

A forcible temporary taking of community property can be robbery, Justice Thomas Willhite said in the 3-0 ruling, if it deprives the other spouse of “a major portion of the value or enjoyment” of the property. And that’s what happened in this case, Willhite said: The evidence showed that Aguilera had taken the phone “to prevent Avila from calling the police in the midst of his violent assault on her.”

It’s all explained here: www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/documents/B261243.PDF.