The United States will pay $36 million to New York City and the state of New York in compensation for the murder of Malcolm X’s in 1965.
In 2021, after each man had served his 20-year sentence for the murder of Malcolm X, he was released from prison.
In an email sent to AFP on Sunday evening, the defense attorney, David Shanies, confirmed that an “injustice (had been) recognized today and a modest step has been taken to correct it.” Mr. Shanies’s clients are Muhammad Aziz, who is now 84 years old, and the family of Khalil Islam, who passed away in 2009.
According to an article published in The New York Times, the city’s legal department had earlier disclosed a financial settlement with “Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam, who were wrongfully convicted of this crime.” Malcolm X was killed on February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, which is a neighborhood in northern Manhattan. This was the crime in question.
Members of Malcolm X’s “Nation of Islam” movement, the two men had been convicted of a murder they did not commit and sentenced to lengthy jail terms in 1966. Between the two of them, they had served about 20 years in prison for a crime that they did not commit.
The Twist In The Murder Of Malcolm X
But on November 19, last year, the New York State Supreme Court overturned the convictions, marking a historic turning point in the legal system.
In the 1960s in the United States, the court even acknowledged its “failure” in imprisoning two innocent men for the assassination of an icon of the black cause. This occurred in the last decade.
In the long and arduous history of African Americans, the passing of Malcolm X was a thunderclap in the sky.
A “tragedy (…) felt around the world,” according to attorney David Shanies, and one that was worsened by the fact that it led to the conviction and imprisonment of two innocent young black men in the United States.
He verified the amounts that were published in the New York Times, which were as follows: $26 million from the city of New York and $10 million from the state of New York.
Both Muhammad Aziz, who was let free in 1985, and Khalil Islam, who was set free in 1987 and passed away in 2009 at the age of 74, have always insisted that they were innocent of the charges against them.
The third convict, Mujahid Abdul Halim, admitted at the time that he had shot Malcolm X and cleared his two co-defendants, but it was to no avail. He was convicted of the crime nonetheless.
Until the court in New York revisited the case in 2020, it was closed.
Netflix documentary On The Murder Of Malcolm X
In point of fact, the presence of Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam at the scene of the assassination was called into question only after the documentary “Who Killed Malcolm X?” was made available on Netflix in February of 2020.
After conducting an investigation and reviewing the evidence for several months, the Manhattan prosecutor at the time, Cyrus Vance, joined forces with the attorneys for the two men and an organization called “The Innocence Project” that works to prevent wrongful convictions in order to file a motion with the New York Supreme Court to have the case dismissed.
In November of last year, prosecutor Vance apologized to the American judicial system for “decades of injustice” and “gross violations of the law and public confidence.”His comments were shown live on TV and were very well received by the crowd.
In court, he stated that he “recognized the importance of this miscarriage of justice,” but he did not elaborate on the rumors that circulated about the unclear role that the New York police department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation played at the time.
Malcolm X threatened
Malcolm X was 39 years old when he was assassinated. He was a radical figure in the African American movement and was accused by his opponents of calling for violence and secession. At the time of his death, Malcolm X had left the “Nation of Islam” and was taking a more conciliatory approach.
After that, members of his former movement threatened him, and his residence in New York City had been vandalized a few days earlier.
The documentary that can be found on Netflix is based on the ideas of a lay historian from Washington named Abdur-Rahman Muhammad. Muhammad says that Aziz and Islam are not guilty of the crime and that the third convict, who admitted to it, did it with four other Nation of Islam members from a mosque in Newark, New Jersey, which is close to New York.
Malcolm X was killed in the 1960s, a time when political and social tensions were high after the deaths of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and civil rights leader Martin Luther King in 1968. Malcolm X’s death shook the United States.
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