According to an attorney, New York City will pay out $26 million to clear two men who were falsely convicted of murdering Malcolm X. This huge legal settlement demonstrates the extent of “misconduct” on the part of the NYPD and FBI agents who handled the case.
The agreement was reached a year after Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam were cleared of all charges in relation to the murder of Malcolm X in 1965. They were imprisoned for 20 years before being granted parole in the 1980s.
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Aziz and Islam’s lawyer Deborah Francois told Gothamist on Sunday that “There’s no amount of money that could ever correct what was robbed from Muhammad and Khalil.” The city took advantage of the chance to act quickly, and for that we are grateful.
Following a nearly two-year inquiry led by the then-Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, their convictions were reversed last November. The investigation discovered that the NYPD, FBI, and prosecutors concealed information that may have cleared the two men of the murder.
The settlement “brings some measure of justice to individuals who spent decades in prison and bore the stigma of being falsely accused,” according to Nicholas Paolucci, spokesperson for the city law department.
He stated that the $26 million payment will be shared equally between the 2009 decedent Islam’s estate and the 84-year-old Aziz. In 1985 and 1987, the men received their jail discharges, respectively.
For many years, experts have said that the government mishandled the investigation into the murder of Malcolm X, who was killed while delivering a lecture in the Washington Heights Audubon Ballroom.
According to Francois, the “primary emphasis” of the civil action was how the FBI and the NYPD handled charging the two individuals.
“Their wrongful convictions were the direct result of government misconduct by both the NYPD and the FBI,” she claimed. That was a known fact, but the exoneration provided concrete evidence in the form of FBI and NYPD reports, each of which contained a wealth of material supporting the exoneration.
The municipal legal department was contacted with inquiries by the NYPD.
Vance highlighted records “revealing that, on orders from Director J. Edgar Hoover himself, the FBI ordered multiple witnesses not to tell police or prosecutors that they were, in fact, FBI informants,” at a press conference after the two men were exonerated last year.
Further rumors regarding the crime and the perpetrators were sparked by the newly made deathbed confession of an NYPD officer, who said that he was responsible for seeing that Malcolm X’s security guards were detained days before the activist was killed.
