Two exonerated African-Americans will receive 36 million dollars

They were victims of one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in African American history. Two men exonerated in 2021, after twenty years each for the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X, will receive a total of $36 million from the city and state of New York.

Lawyer David Shanies, defender of Muhammad Aziz, 84, and the family of Khalil Islam, who died in 2009, confirmed in an email on Sunday evening that an “injustice (had) today been recognized and a modest step crossed to correct it”. Asked by the New York Timesthe legal department of New York City Hall had earlier revealed a financial compensation agreement with “Misters Aziz and Islam unjustly condemned for this crime”: the murder of Malcolm X on February 21, 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom, a performance hall in Harlem, a neighborhood in northern Manhattan.

More than 40 years in prison between them

The two men, members of Malcolm X’s “Nation of Islam” movement, had been sentenced in 1966 to heavy prison terms and had spent 42 years between them behind bars – around 20 years each – for a murder that they had never done. But on November 19, in a historic judicial coup, the New York State Supreme Court cleared them.

Justice had even recognized its “failure” by having imprisoned two innocent people for the assassination of the icon of the cause of black people in the 1960s in the United States. The disappearance of Malcolm X was a thunderclap in the painful history of African Americans. A “tragedy (…) felt around the world and compounded by the fact that it led to the conviction and imprisonment of two young, innocent black men in America”; denounced the lawyer David Shanies.

A Netflix documentary

He confirmed the New York Times figures: $26 million from New York City and $10 million from New York State. Muhammad Aziz, released in 1985, and Khalil Islam, released in 1987 and died in 2009 at the age of 74, have always maintained their innocence. The third convict, Mujahid Abdul Halim, had admitted to him at the time having shot Malcolm X, and had exonerated his two co-defendants, but in vain.

Until the New York justice reopened the case in 2020. It was indeed necessary to wait for the broadcast in February 2020 of a documentary on Netflix (“Who Killed Malcolm X?”), renewing doubts about the presence of ‘Aziz and Islam at the scene of the assassination. After months of a retrial, then-Manhattan prosecutor Cyrus Vance teamed up with lawyers for both men and an organization, The Innocence Project, which fights against miscarriages of justice, to file a a motion to vacate in the New York Supreme Court.

“Apologies” after “decades of injustice”

And last November, live on television and to applause, Prosecutor Vance offered the “apologies” of US judicial authorities for “decades of injustice” and “unacceptable violations of the law and public trust”. ‘public opinion “. Before the court, he had “recognized the seriousness of this error” judicial, without expanding on the rumors concerning the troubled role played at the time by the federal police (FBI) and that of New York.

At the time of his assassination, Malcolm X, 39, a radical figure in the African-American cause, accused by his detractors of calling for violence and separatism, had left “Nation of Islam” and made a more consensual turn. He had then been threatened by members of his former movement and his home in New York had been the target of an attack a few days earlier.