Arthur Greene
Two of the three men convicted of killing Malcolm X are set to be exonerated – 55 years after one of America’s most celebrated civil rights leaders was shot dead in New York.
Muhammad Aziz and the late Khalil Islam each spent more than 20 years in prison after they were found guilty of shooting Malcolm X dead whilst he was making a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in New York in 1965.
Three men stormed the stage and shot him in front of his pregnant wife and three of his daughters. One of the assassins was shot in the leg and arrested at the scene, while the other two fled.
Aziz, then known as Norman 3X Butler, was arrested five days later, and Mr. Islam, known as Thomas 15X Johnson, five days after that.
The man who was arrested was Mujahid Abdul Halim. Halim readily confessed to the murder but throughout his trial, he maintained that Aziz and Islam were not his accomplices and were innocent of Malcom X’s murder.
Since then, lawyers, activists and journalists have increasingly raised doubts over the outcome of one of the most notorious killings in America’s history.
In 2019, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr ordered an investigation into the mishandling of proceedings following the assassination.
His team found that not only did the prosecution not have enough evidence to convict Aziz and Islam, but that they knowingly withheld information that could have proved the men’s innocence.
There was never any physical evidence linking either man to the crime scene, and several defence witnesses supported the men’s alibis that they were not there when the assassination took place.
In an interview with the New York Times on behalf of the law enforcement who mishandled the trials of the two Black Muslim men he said that nothing can repair the damage done to Aziz and Islam, but “what we can do is acknowledge the error, the severity of the error.”
Khalil Islam died in 1997, 22 years after he was released – almost the same amount of time he spent in prison.
When documentary maker Abdur-Rahman Muhammad asked Aziz to sign a petition asking the Manhattan district attorney to review his conviction, he agreed. But he told him that the two decades he spent in prison destroyed any hope he had that his name would be cleared.
Image source: @GlobalNews
