$36 million for two decades wrongfully spent behind bars. This is the amount of reparations awarded to two former American anti-racist activists, sentenced in 1966 to 20 years in prison each for the murder of Malcolm X in 1965.
Lawyer David Shanies, defender of Muhammad Aziz, 84, and the family of Khalil Islam, who died in 2009, confirmed in an email on Sunday night that “today an injustice has been recognized and a modest step to correct it”.
asked by him New York Timesthe legal department of the New York City Council had previously disclosed a financial restitution agreement with “Messrs. Aziz and Islam wrongly convicted of this crime”: the murder of Malcolm X on February 21, 1965 in the gallery of the Audubon Ballroom, a performance hall in Harlem, a neighborhood in northern Manhattan.
The two men, members of Malcolm X’s “Nation of Islam” movement, had been sentenced in 1966 to harsh prison terms and had between them spent 42 years behind bars for a murder they had never heard of.
Spectacular legal reversal
But on November 19, 2021, in a historic judicial twist, the New York State Supreme Court acquitted them. Justice had even recognized his “failure” to have imprisoned two innocent people for the murder of the icon of the cause of blacks in the 1960s in the United States. The disappearance of Malcolm X was a thunderbolt in the painful history of African Americans.
A “tragedy (…) felt throughout the world and aggravated by the fact that it led to the conviction and imprisonment of two innocent young black men in the United States,” said attorney David Shanies.
confirmed the figures of New York Times$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 who died in 2009 at the age of 74, have always maintained their innocence.
The third convict, Mujahid Abdul Halim, admitted to him at the time that he had shot Malcolm X and exonerated his two co-defendants, but to no avail. Until the New York justice reopens the case in 2020.
A Netflix documentary that came to sow doubts
Indeed, it was necessary to wait for the broadcast in February 2020 of a documentary on Netflix (“Who killed Malcolm X?”), renewing doubts about the presence of MM. Aziz and Islam at the murder scene.
After months of a new trial, then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance teamed up with the two men’s attorneys and an organization, The Innocence Project, which fights miscarriage of justice, to file a motion to vacate in court. New York Supreme.
On November dernier, in direct à la television et sous les applaudissements, the attorney Vance avait presented the “excuses” of the American judicial authorities for “décennies d’injustice” et des “unacceptable violations of the loi et de la confiance de l’ public opinion”.
Before the court, he had “recognized the seriousness of this judicial error”, without expanding on the rumors about the problematic role played at the time by the federal police (FBI) and the New York police.
An alternative thesis that includes five murderers
At the time of his murder, Malcolm X, 39, a radical anti-racist figure in the United States, accused by his detractors of calling for violence and separatism, had left the “Nation of Islam” and taken a more consensual turn. He had then been threatened by members of his old movement and his home in New York had been attacked a few days earlier.
The Netflix documentary is based on the thesis of a non-professional historian from Washington, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, who defends the innocence of MM. Aziz and Islam and that the third convict, who had admitted the facts, had acted with four other members of the “Nation of Islam” from a mosque in Newark, New Jersey, near New York.
The assassination of Malcolm X had shaken the United States, in full political and social tension in the 1960s, marked by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the 1968 assassination of civil rights figure Martin Luther King. .
Source: BFM TV
