Exoneration Is ‘Bittersweet’ for Men Cleared in Malcolm X’s Murder

Muhammad A. Aziz stood up in a New York City courtroom on Thursday, 55 years after he and two other men were found guilty of murdering Malcolm X, and began to speak.

Minutes later, he would walk out of the courtroom an innocent man in the eyes of the law, his conviction in the assassination of one of the most influential Black leaders of the civil rights era overturned by a judge. But first he addressed a silent room.

“I do not need this court, these prosecutors or a piece of paper to tell me I am innocent,” he said in a stern voice that did not shake or falter. “I am an 83-year-old man who was victimized by the criminal justice system.”

Mr. Aziz and his co-defendant, Khalil Islam, were exonerated on Thursday after a review initiated by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., found that they had not received a fair trial. The investigation found that evidence pointing toward their innocence had been withheld by some of the country’s most prominent law enforcement agencies, and that at least some information was suppressed on the order of the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover.

But Mr. Aziz, his lawyers and two of Mr. Islam’s sons made it clear on Thursday that they did not think it was a day for celebration, but a moment that reflected a profound injustice administered a half-century earlier in the same courthouse.

“I hope the same system that was responsible for this travesty of justice also takes responsibility for the immeasurable harm it caused to me,” Mr. Aziz said, adding that his conviction was part of a corrupt process “that is all too familiar to Black people, even in 2021.”

Ameen Johnson, noting the absence of his father, Mr. Islam, who died in 2009, called the hearing “good, but bittersweet,” adding, “I honestly didn’t think that I was going to live to see the day.”

The hearing rewrote the official history of one of the most infamous moments of the civil rights era, when Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 by gunmen in an Upper Manhattan ballroom a year after leaving the Nation of Islam. The decision confirmed the doubts that historians have long held concerning the convictions of the two men, as one of their lawyers noted during the hearing.

“This has been an exoneration in plain sight for decades,” said the lawyer, Barry Scheck, the co-founder of the Innocence Project.

Along with Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam, a third man, Mujahid Abdul Halim, was also found guilty in 1966, and his conviction stands. At the trial, he confessed to the murder. He said then, and has maintained, that the other two men were innocent.

The exonerations came after a 22-month review of Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam’s convictions. It concluded what scholars had long argued: that the case against them was flawed from the start, based on conflicting witness testimony and a total lack of physical evidence.

“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,” said Ellen N. Biben, the State Supreme Court judge in Manhattan who presided over Thursday’s hearing. As she granted the motion to throw out the…