THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019 51
never told before. Your goal is to show
them you’re safe to release.”
The stories that imprisoned men and
women tell the board about their crimes
often diverge from the facts in their court
or parole files. Sometimes people are
minimizing their guilt. Sometimes they
are misremembering details of events
that occurred decades earlier. Sometimes
they are actually correct, and the details
in the official documents are wrong. And
sometimes they have no memory at all
of the crime they have committed and
have created a narrative about it that
makes sense to them. Like many of the
men with whom Dennis was impris-
oned, he had repeatedly filed appeals
in the courts in the first decade of his
incarceration. The lawyers who wrote
them argued that he had been wrongly
convicted—his defense attorney at trial
claimed that he was not guilty—and
after he lost his initial appeals and started
representing himself, writing his own
legal papers and filing them pro se, Den-
nis continued to make this claim. His
court battles continued for more than
ten years. But, once he was eligible for
parole, he took the advice of peers: “As
long as you deny the crime, they’re going
to keep hitting you.” He appeared be-
fore the parole board for the first time
in the summer of 1996, when he was
forty-five years old. In a room at Attica,
seated across from two male commis-
sioners, he admitted to having killed Pa-
trolman Denton, and recounted a story
about arguing with him, saying that “the
argument initiated into a fight, and one
thing led to another, and that’s when
the officer got hit in the neck.” The pa-
role board turned him down, writing in
its decision that Dennis was “still in de-
nial” and “does not voice any remorse.”
During the next two decades, Den-
nis appeared before the parole board
every other year. Transcripts from his
hearings show that he attempted to ex-
press remorse. In 2002, he said, “I take
responsibility for everything I did. I’ve
hurt a lot of people through this.” In
2010, he said, “I regret it. Wasn’t my in-
tention to murder anybody or kill any-
body.” In 2011, the state parole board
began using a new “risk assessment” tool,
to measure the likelihood that an indi-
vidual would commit another crime once
he was released. An assessment of Den-
nis found that he was a low risk, but the
board continued to turn him down. In
the course of twelve parole appearances,
he was interviewed by twenty-five board
members, some of them more than once.
In 2018, the parole board explained its
decision with the same language it had
used many times before: “Your release at
this time is incompatible with the wel-
fare of society.” There was no indication
of what he could do to increase his odds
of obtaining parole the next time.W
hen I first met Dennis’s volun-
teers, last March, they were just
about to go back to Auburn for the first
time in ten months, to start getting him
ready for his parole hearing in August.On March 30th, Button and Lee drove
together from Brooklyn, leaving as usual
at 4 a.m. White, who had enrolled in a
master’s program in art history at the
University of Massachusetts, drove from
Amherst. Earlier, they had studied the
transcript of Dennis’s last hearing, and
were pleased with his performance. He’d
been more talkative. “I thought it was
a three-thousand-per-cent improve-
ment,” Lee said.
Four days later, I sat down with But-
ton and Lee, in a café in Manhattan, to
hear about their visit. In the Auburn
visiting room, they said, they had tried
to keep the conversation focussed on
strategies for Dennis’s hearing, but, asMichelle Lewin and Anthony Dixon, of the Parole Preparation Project.