A New York man who spent two decades in prison for the murder of civil rights leader Malcolm X is suing city leaders and former law enforcement officers over his wrongful imprisonment after he was exonerated late last year.
Attorneys representing Muhammad Aziz, 83, filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York against New York City seeking $40 million for the more than 20 years he spent in prison after being convicted in 1966 for the death of Malcolm X, a crime that occurred in New York City’s Audubon Ballroom while Aziz was at home, officials later determined. Aziz was exonerated in November 2021, 56 years after the assassination.
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“As a result of his wrongful conviction and imprisonment, Mr. Aziz spent 20 years in prison for a crime he did not commit and more than 55 years living with the hardship and indignity attendant to being unjustly branded as a convicted murderer of one of the most important civil rights leaders in history,” the lawsuit said.
Officials carried out the wrongful arrest after withholding evidence and pressuring witnesses to give false statements, the suit alleged. The charges against Aziz were filed based on eyewitness testimony without any physical evidence, the lawyers said.
Investigators opened an inquiry into Aziz’s conviction after the documentary Who Killed Malcolm X? aired on Netflix in the beginning of 2020. The New York Police Department and the FBI withheld key evidence that would have cleared him during the initial trial, the investigation found.
“The presumption of probable cause created by the grand jury indictment is overcome by the fact that Mr. Aziz’s indictment was secured based on bad-faith police misconduct,” the complaint says.
Aziz and Khalil Islam, another man who was wrongfully convicted for Malcolm X’s death, were released on parole in the 1980s after serving a 20-year sentence. Islam died in 2009 and was exonerated posthumously in November.
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Eyewitness testimony about one shooter’s appearance did not match Islam, the investigation revealed. Instead, it matched a man named William Bradley, who was already known to the FBI, and a living witness corroborated Aziz’s alibi.
Three gunmen killed Malcolm X in Harlem as he was about to deliver a speech on Feb. 21, 1965. One shooter, Mujahid Abdul Halim, also known as Talmadge Hayer, was arrested at the scene. All of the suspects were involved with the Nation of Islam, a black nationalist group from which Malcolm X had distanced himself the year before.
