The official record of one of the most important political assassinations in American history will be rewritten on Thursday afternoon when the Manhattan district attorney \u2026<\/b>
\nThe official record of one of the most important political assassinations in American history will be rewritten on Thursday afternoon when the Manhattan district attorney steps into a courtroom and asks a state judge to vacate the convictions of two men found guilty in the killing of Malcolm X more than a half-century ago. A 22-month review jointly conducted by the district attorney\u2019s office and lawyers for the two men, Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam, found what historians and scholars had long known: that the case against them was dubious from the start, based on conflicting witness testimony and no physical evidence. The Manhattan district attorney\u2019s office, the New York Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation all withheld evidence pointing to different suspects that would have likely led to the men\u2019s acquittal, the review found. Now,55 years after they were convicted, the verdicts are expected to be tossed out in a historic rectification of injustice. Mr. Aziz,83, will be in court and is expected to make a statement. He was released from prison in 1985. Mr. Islam was released in 1987 and died in 2009 at age 74. His relatives are also expected to be in court. A third man, Mujahid Abdul Halim, was also found guilty, and his conviction stands. At the trial, he confessed to the murder, but said and has maintained that the other two men were innocent. But the wrongful convictions allowed the other true assassins to escape accountability, compounding the tragedy of a killing that silenced one America\u2019s most influential Black leaders, whose words and ideas still reverberate in contemporary social-justice movements. The men who some historians say were the actual assassins are also dead, as well as the witnesses who testified and the police officers who handled the case. Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., the Manhattan district attorney who launched the review, apologized on behalf of law enforcement on Wednesday during an interview with The New York Times. He took up the case in January 2020, after meeting with Mr. Aziz and his lawyers from the Innocence Project and the Shanies Law Office. \u201cThis points to the truth that law enforcement over history has often failed to live up to its responsibilities,\u201d Mr. Vance said in an interview. \u201cThese men did not get the justice that they deserved.\u201d The men were known as Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson in 1966 when they were convicted and branded as the killers of Malcolm X, who was eulogized by the actor Ossie Davis as \u201cour Black shining prince.\u201d Their convictions rested entirely on the testimony of eyewitnesses who gave conflicting and inconsistent testimony, and there were no records of the identification procedures the police had used, the re-investigation found. The investigation reviewed informant and witness accounts, conversations about undercover officers between police and prosecutors and reams of other documents. Some were newly discovered and some had been pored over publicly for years by historians, journalists and hobbyist seeking the truth. Key pieces of evidence were missing, like the shotgun that fired the fatal blast. While clearing the names of Mr. Aziz and Mr. Muhammad, who were enforcers in the Nation of Islam when Malcolm X left the sect in an acrimonious split, the review does not pinpoint who was responsible for the assassination. Though it found no evidence the killing was orchestrated by the government \u2014 a popular conspiracy theory \u2014 it did not answer broader questions about the role of the Nation\u2019s leadership, the police and the federal government in the assassination. Investigators\u2019 inability to ascertain the answers to those unknowns adds fresh grist to calls for a broader federal investigation.<\/p>\n