2 men set to be exonerated in killing of Malcolm X

“Exonerating these men is a righteous and well-deserved affirmation of their true character,” said civil rights laywer David Shansies.

Two of the three men convicted in the assassination of Malcolm X are set to be cleared Thursday after insisting on their innocence since the 1965 killing of one of the United States’ most formidable fighters for civil rights, their lawyers and Manhattan’s top prosecutor said Wednesday.

A nearly two-year-long re-investigation found that authorities withheld evidence favorable to the defense in the trial of Muhammad Aziz, now 83, and the late Khalil Islam, said their attorneys, the Innocence Project and civil rights lawyer David Shanies.

“The assassination of Malcolm X was a historic event that demanded a scrupulous investigation and prosecution but, instead, produced one of the most blatant miscarriages of justice that I have ever seen,” Innocence Project co-founder Barry Scheck said in a statement.

Vance later tweeted that his office would join the men’s attorneys in asking a judge Thursday to toss out the convictions.

“These men did not get the justice that they deserved,” District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. told The New York Times, which first reported on the developments.

One of the civil rights era’s most controversial and compelling figures, Malcolm X rose to fame as the Nation of Islam’s chief spokesperson, proclaiming the Black Muslim organization’s message at the time: racial separatism as a road to self-actualization. He famously urged Black people to claim civil rights “by any means necessary” and referred to white people as “blue-eyed devils,” and he later denounced racism.

About a year before his death, he split from the Nation of Islam and later made a pilgrimage to Mecca, returning with a new view of the potential for racial unity. Some in the Nation of Islam saw him as a traitor.

At age 39, he was gunned down as he began a speech in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom on Feb. 21, 1965.