Mark Wahlberg's Request for Pardon Over 1988 Teen Assaults Dropped

Mark Wahlberg‘s request for pardon over the 1998 assaults he committed as a teenager has been closed.

A Massachusetts Parole Board spokesman said Thursday that the Oscar-nominated actor never responded to a letter asking if he wished to keep his request open. Without a response, the government had no choice but to close the pardon request.

In 1988, then 16-year-old Wahlberg was convicted as an adult for assault from charges stemming from an attempted robbery of a convenience store. In the pardon petition, Wahlberg explained he attempted to steal two cases of alcohol from a man standing outside a convenience store. He wrote that he hit the person on the head with a wooden stick he was carrying, then ran down the block to avoid the police and encountered another man, whom he punched in the face.

“I was detained by police a few minutes after that,” he said in the petition. “While I was detained, the police discovered that I had a small amount of marijuana in my back pocket. During the incident, I was under the influence of alcohol and narcotics.”

Wahlberg was tried as an adult and ended up serving 45 days in jail for the assault case.

As for why Wahlberg decided to request a pardon in the first place, he told E! News in 2014 it was because he felt he had done enough good deeds since then to make up for his crimes. “I’ve been spending the past 27 years trying to correct the mistakes that I’ve made,” Wahlberg told us. “I’m not trying to gain a pardon because I feel like, well, now I’m rich and successful. I didn’t ask for it five years, 10 years, 20 years, 25 years after the fact.”

He continued, “I feel like I have now gotten to a place where not only did I have a huge amount of remorse but I have done tons of work to better myself as a person, not as a celebrity.”

But Wahlberg told reporters at the Toronto Film Festival that he regrets asking for the pardon. “It was one of those things where it was just kind of presented to me, and if I could’ve done it over again I would never have focused on that or applied,” Wahlberg said of the pardon application. “I didn’t need that, I spent 28 years righting the wrong. I didn’t need a piece of paper to acknowledge it. I was kind of pushed into doing it, I certainly didn’t need to or want to relive that stuff over again.”

He admitted that he was grateful that the process allowed him to meet with one of his victims and apologize for what he had done.