The two men, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, both spent over 20 years in prison for Malcolm X’s murder, which they always maintained they did not commit….reports Asian Lite News
The two men, who were exonerated after wrongly convicted in the 1965 assassination of human rights activist Malcolm X, will receive $36 million from the city and state of New York, their lawyer confirmed Sunday night.
Malcolm X was gunned down on February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City while he was addressing a gathering.
“The tragedy of Malcolm X’s murder was felt all over the world, and compounded by the fact that it led to the convictions and imprisonment of two innocent, young, Black men in America,” their lawyer David Shanies said in an emailed statement to AFP.
The two men, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, both spent over 20 years in prison for Malcolm X’s murder, which they always maintained they did not commit.
They were released in the mid-1980s, but it was not until November 2021 that their names were fully cleared by the New York State Supreme Court, which called their convictions almost a half-century ago “a failure of justice”, it was reported.
“Today we acknowledge that injustice and take a modest step toward rectifying it,” AFP quoted Shanies as saying.
He confirmed a report from the New York Times that the city of New York will pay $26 million to be split between 84-year-old Muhammad Aziz and the family of Islam, who died in 2009.
The state government of New York will also pay five million dollars each, for a total of $36 million in compensation.
The two and a third man named Mujahid Abdul Halim were convicted of murder in 1966 and sentenced to life in prison.
Halim, now 81 and released from prison in 2010, confessed to the murder but maintained the innocence of the other two.
In November last year, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance together with Shanies Law Office and non-profit legal organisation Innocence Project moved to vacate the convictions and dismiss the indictments of Aziz and Islam.
A two-year re-investigation found that the two didn’t receive a fair trial as New York Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation withheld exculpatory evidence that would have likely led to their acquittal.
Vance said in the court: “I apologise for what were serious, unacceptable violations of the law and the public trust. I apologise on behalf of our nation’s law enforcement for this decades-long injustice, which has eroded public faith in institutions that are designed to guarantee the equal protection of the law.