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Key documents were lost to time and physical evidence, such as murder weapons, were no longer available to be tested.
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Many of those involved in the murder case, including witnesses, investigators and trial lawyers as well as other potential suspects, died long ago. Vance’s reinvestigation, conducted with the Innocence Project and the office of David Shanies, a civil rights lawyer, contended with serious obstacles. Those failures, he said, could not be remedied, “but what we can do is acknowledge the error, the severity of the error.” In an interview, Vance apologized on behalf of law enforcement, which he said had failed the families of the two men. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney who is among the nation’s most prominent local prosecutors, recasts one of the most painful moments in modern American history.Īnd at a time when racism and discrimination in the criminal justice system are once again the focus of a national protest movement, it reveals a bitter truth: that two of the people convicted of killing Malcolm X - Black Muslim men hastily arrested and tried on shaky evidence - were themselves victims of the very discrimination and injustice that he denounced in language that has echoed across the decades. “God bless you, they’re exonerated,” he said in a quiet voice. At the trial, he confessed to the murder, but said and has maintained that the other two men were innocent.Īt his home in Brooklyn on Thursday, Halim, now 80, offered a simple response to the news about his co-defendants. That man, Mujahid Abdul Halim, was also found guilty, and his conviction stands. It also left unanswered questions about how and why the police and the federal government failed to prevent the assassination by at least one member of a New Jersey chapter of the Nation of Islam. Nor did it uncover a police or government conspiracy to murder him. Those who were previously implicated but never arrested are dead. The review, which was undertaken as an explosive documentary about the assassination and a new biography renewed interest in the case, did not identify who prosecutors now believe really killed Malcolm X. 21, 1965, when three men opened fire inside the crowded Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan as Malcolm X was starting to speak.īut the case against them was questionable from the outset, and in the decades since, historians and amateur investigators have raised doubts about the official story. The two men, known at the time of the killing as Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, spent decades in prison for the murder, which took place Feb. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York TimesĪ 22-month investigation conducted jointly by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and lawyers for the two men found that prosecutors and two of the nation’s premier law enforcement agencies - the FBI and the New York Police Department - had withheld key evidence that, had it been turned over, would likely have led to the men’s acquittal.
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“This is one of the most prominent figures of the 20th century who commanded enormous attention and respect. “It’s long overdue,” said Bryan Stevenson, a civil rights lawyer and the founder of the Equal Justice initiative. Their exoneration represents a remarkable acknowledgment of grave errors made in a case of towering importance: the 1965 murder of one of America’s most influential Black leaders. Aziz and Khalil Islam, who each spent more than 20 years in prison.
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NEW YORK -Two of the men found guilty of the assassination of Malcolm X are expected to have their convictions thrown out Thursday, the Manhattan district attorney and lawyers for the two men said, rewriting the official history of one of the most notorious murders of the civil rights era.įor decades, historians have cast doubt on the case against the two men, Muhammad A.