![Mark Denny running the NYC Half Marathon in 2019. [Courtesy of NYRR]](https://s1.stabroeknews.com/images/2021/12/Mark-Denny.jpg)
He migrated to the United States of America as a happy, athletic child, who enjoyed running, climbing fruit trees, playing games with his friends outside, and having great fun as a growing boy in Guyana. In his new borough community, he would learn how to box, skate and play hockey.
But instead of the immigrant’s dream of steady success, Mark Denny ended locked up in a dystopian nightmare of adult prisons just before his 17th birthday, for serious crimes including rape, he did not commit. Stubbornly insisting that he was innocent and therefore refusing to admit guilt or express remorse, Mr Denny stayed behind bars – condemned by an impossible system for repeating the truth – for the next 30 numbing years.
Stigmatised and targeted as a convicted Black sex offender by hostile inmates and left literally fighting for his life, he was forced to move from one hardened jail to the next, even as the real perpetrators, ironically, gained parole in plea deals or escaped justice when the traumatised victim refused to again testify.