New York agrees to pay $26 Million to men wrongly convicted of Killing Malcolm X
Muhammad Aziz walks out of a Manhattan court after his conviction was vacated in New York last November.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times
New York City has agreed to pay $26 million to settle lawsuits filed on behalf of two men whose convictions in the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X were thrown out last year after a judge found “serious miscarriages of justice”.
According to the city and federal court records, the two men, Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam, each spent more than 20 years in prison after their hasty arrests and a trial that relied on questionable evidence in one of the most notorious murders of the civil rights era.
Their exonerations last November — Mr. Islam’s was posthumous — came as allegations of racism and discrimination in the criminal justice system were again prompting national protests and political debate.
The throwing out of the men’s convictions came after a 22-month investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, then led by Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and the men’s lawyers, which found that prosecutors, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department had withheld key evidence that probably would have led to acquittals had it been presented to a jury.
“This settlement brings some measure of justice to individuals who spent decades in prison and bore the stigma of being falsely accused of murdering an iconic figure,” Nick Paolucci, a spokesman for the New York City Law Department, said in a statement.
“Based on our review,” Mr. Paolucci said, “this office stands by the opinion of former Manhattan district attorney Vance who stated, based on his investigation, that ‘there is one ultimate conclusion: Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam were wrongfully convicted of this crime.’”
Mr. Paolucci and David B. Shanies, a lawyer for the two men, said the settlement will be split evenly between Mr. Aziz, who was released in 1985 and is now 84; and the estate of Mr. Islam, who was released in 1987 and died in 2009 at 74.
Mr. Shanies said the settlement was significant not only because of the historic nature of the underlying crime and the degree of government misconduct, but also because it took more than 50 years to rectify the injustice, more than a decade after Mr. Islam’s death.
“It’s tragic that he died never knowing that his name would be cleared,” Mr. Shanies said. “So, given the importance of the case and the immense length of time that this wrongful conviction lingered, it was important for the government to act quickly to do what was within its power to make it right.”
Mr. Shanies and his colleague Deborah I. Francois represented Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam’s family in the lawsuits. They, along with the Innocence Project, also collaborated with Mr. Vance’s office in the investigation that led to the vacating of the convictions.
Barry Scheck, the co-founder of the Innocence Project, referring to long-held doubts about the men’s convictions, said: “This was an exoneration in plain sight. Historians had long determined that these two men were wrongly convicted.”
“This case should have been overturned decades ago,” added Mr. Scheck, who worked on the investigation with his colleague, Vanessa Potkin.
Mr. Shanies said New York State had reached separate $5 million settlements for each of Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam’s estates.
The agreement reached with the Law Department, which is led by Sylvia O. Hinds-Radix, who is the city corporation counsel, was also approved by the city comptroller, Brad Lander, according to Mr. Paolucci.
The settlements came quickly, less than four months after the lawsuits were filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.
The deal followed confidential negotiations between the parties this month that were overseen by Robert M. Levy, a federal magistrate judge in Brooklyn, according to entries in the federal court docket there. The negotiations ended with Judge Levy recommending a settlement to both sides, the docket shows.
The city has paid millions in recent years to settle wrongful conviction and incarceration lawsuits. In 2014, the city paid $41 million to five men whose convictions were overturned in the brutal 1989 beating and rape of a female jogger in Central Park — roughly $1 million for each year the men spent in prison.
The settlement for Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam recalls America’s civil rights history. Malcolm X had been a fiery and prominent member of the Nation of Islam, which promoted racial separatism. Many members replaced their surnames with the letter X to replace the identities their families had lost in slavery; Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little.
In 1965, a year after having broken with Nation of Islam, he was launching the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and gave a speech about it at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights on Feb. 21. Shortly after he began to speak, he was attacked by three gunmen. Arrests quickly followed.
Doubts about the convictions of Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam had been raised for years. Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam were convicted along with a third man, Mujahid Abdul Halim, at the 1966 trial, during which all three men testified and denied the allegations against them. But Mr. Halim later testified again and admitted involvement in the murder and said Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam were innocent.
Last November, Ellen N. Biben, the State Supreme Court judge who granted the men’s motions to vacate their convictions, said, “I regret that this court cannot fully undo the serious miscarriages of justice in this case and give you back the many years that were lost.”
