Mark Wahlberg drops pardon request for 1988 assaults

Mark Wahlberg is no longer pursuing a 2014 request to be pardoned for assaults committed in Boston in April 1988, when he was 16.

A Massachusetts parole board spokesman told the Associated Press on Thursday that the 45-year-old actor’s petition has been closed after Wahlberg didn’t answer to a letter asking if he wanted to keep it open.

The “Deepwater Horizon” star and executive producer told reporters at the Toronto International Film Festival on Tuesday that he regrets asking for the pardon but noted that “some good did come out of it” because he was able to meet one of the victims and apologize, the AP said.

In his November 2014 petition, Wahlberg said he was “deeply sorry” for the assaults and had worked hard to become a role model.

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The father of four has said he was trying to steal beer when he punched Johnny Trinh in the eye after first hitting another Vietnamese man in the head with a large stick and hurling racial slurs. Wahlberg spent 45 days of a two-year sentence in prison for the felony.

Though it was reported that Trinh was blinded in one eye during the attack, the victim said in 2014 that he’d lost the eye in a grenade explosion when he was with the South Vietnamese army in 1975.

“He was young and reckless but I forgive him now,” Trinh told the Daily Mail. “Everyone deserves another chance. … I would like to see him get a pardon. He should not have the crime hanging over him any longer.”

At the New York premiere of “The Gambler” in December 2014, Wahlberg told the Associated Press that he was seeking the pardon for multiple reasons but in “no way, shape or form” did he think his celebrity alone was a reason for it to be granted. Among the reasons: On the pardon application, he said he wanted to get a concessionaire’s license for Wahlburgers, the restaurant chain he owns with his brothers.

“Deepwater Horizon,” about the 2010 BP oil spill, will have its U.S. premiere Monday in New Orleans. It opens in U.S. theaters Sept. 30.

Follow Christie D’Zurilla on Twitter @theCDZ.

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