An Activist With a Problematic Past Says Brendan Depa’s Appeal of Prison Sentence Is Going Forward

On the day Brendan Depa turned 19, and a day after he was transferred to a state prison in the Panhandle to serve his five-year sentence in the beating of his paraprofessional at Matanzas High School in 2023, an activist with a problematic past and an advocate for Depa said he has retained an attorney to handle Depa’s appeal, with every intention to “bring him home.”




Mark Hadden, a 56-year-old Vero Beach resident, describes himself as a former professional basketball player in overseas leagues, an NBA recruiter and the founder in 1993 of an organization called the American Coalition for the Advancement of All People. He alerted local reporters by email to a press conference he held at the county courthouse to announce the “great news” that Depa’s appeal was going forward. Hadden said he had personally retained Fort Lauderdale Attorney Robert David Malove, a criminal trial attorney.

Malove himself could not be reached, but Peter Armstrong of that law firm confirmed in an email that the law firm was retained by Hadden to represent Depa. Malove and Hani Demetrious declared themselves Depa’s attorneys of record in a notice of appearance to the court on Aug. 13.

Hadden is a registered sex offender who in 1997 was charged with sexual battery and lewd and lascivious battery involving an underage girl. He pleaded to an attempted lewd and lascivious act on a child younger than 16, was sentenced to six months in jail, five years’ probation, and was designated a sexual offender. Adjudication was withheld. After his probation terminated, he was sentenced to 28 months in prison for failing to register as a sex offender. His sex-offender conditions remain in effect. According to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE)’s registry, he was found twice guilty of failing to comply with registration requirements, in 2007 and 2019.

Hadden has disputed the arrest from its origins. “I’m a Black man and that was a white woman,” he said. “I’m use to stuff I’ve had to deal with, with that Black thing.” He disputed the designation as a sex offender, but a court reaffirmed it in 2017, denying a motion to vacate the designation.

Hadden confirmed that he was the Hadden in the sex-offender registry in a phone call only after the press conference when a reporter reached him to verify his identity. He did not refer to the arrest and subsequent disposition of his case during the press conference, or to have been in the system in any way, though he made allusions to a difficult past. He said Malove had represented Him previously.




He spoke to three reporters. The Division of Corporations includes a record of his organization, but the organization was established in 2020, not 1993. He is listed as the president. When asked what had led him to establish his organization, he said “I found out that life ain’t fair.” Asked specifically if there had been a trigger to founding the organization, he could not cite a specific example, but said he was fighting for people who’d been wronged in the justice system.

On the phone later, when asked about the sex offense, he said: “I’ve experienced what a black man has gone through unlawfully.” He said he talks “extensively” about the conviction in his book, All Hadden, a memoir self-published this year. He had brought a marketing poster of the book to the press conference and at one point held up the book as a television camera and his own social media live feed rolled. He wore a white t-shirt with a picture of the book’s cover on the front, and his website in large letters, making it seem as if he was using the press conference to market his book. (The book, which describes his conviction as the result of “entrapment,” includes a segment on Depa.)

Hadden said he had attended both phases of Depa’s sentencing. He spoke very critically of Circuit Judge Terence Perkins, who he claims had convicted Depa before the sentencing began, and sentenced him to as harsh a sentence–five years in prison, 15 years on probation–only because Depa is Black. “It really angers me. This guy was guilty from the word go. He should’ve been sentenced as a juvenile,” Hadden said. “The probation is nothing but a trap.”




Hadden said he was “flabbergasted” by the sentence, which he called “this travesty that this town has done to him.” He described himself as “a Joan Naydich fan,” a reference to the paraprofessional whom Depa assaulted, saying she should not have been in the situation she was in any more than Depa was, at Matanzas High School.

Hadden spoke at length about the litigated parts of the Depa case, but when it came to addressing next steps–the appeal–he said little other than referring to retaining Malove, and criticizing Kurt Teifke, the attorney Depa’s mother, Leann Depa, had retained to defend her son. He suggested that claiming ineffective counsel would be part of the appeal. (In his book, Hadden said one of his former attorneys “colluded with  law enforcement and state attorneys, advising me to plead guilty” to a misdemeanor failure to register his brother’s vehicle.)

Meanwhile, Hadden said, Depa “will get eaten up quickly” in prison.

Malove is currently handling the case of Aaron Wanless, an Air Force veteran suffering from PTSD originally sentenced in 2019 to 48 years in prison for firing a shot in the direction of an Okaloosa County sheriff’s deputy and wielding a knife. Evidentiary hearings are ongoing in that case.

Depa was Baker Acted immediately after his sentence, when he made intimations that he was going to harm himself. Hadden met with him while he was Baker Acted at an SMA facility in Daytona Beach, where Depa’s parents also spent time with him. He was transferred to an Orlando “reception” center in the Florida prison system on Aug. 14, and to the prison in Wakulla–Wakulla Correctional Institution–in the Big Bend area on Wednesday. His mother could not be reached today.

[Correction: an earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Hadden’s prison sentence was for the original disposition of the case, rather than for failing to register as a sex offender several years later, though in the original disposition, he was sentenced to six months’ incarceration followed by probation.]

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