New York Compensates Men Wrongly Convicted for Malcom X KillingTwo men who were wrongly convicted of the assassination of civil rights icon Malcolm X in 1965 and who were cleared of those charges last year will be compensated with $36 million.\n\nNew York City will pay the men $26 million, while New York state will pay $10 million, according to David Shanies, the men’s attorney.\n\nBoth men, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam always maintained they were innocent.\n\nAziz is 84. Islam died in 2009.\n\nA judge dismissed the men’s convictions last year in the face of new evidence that there was witness intimidation and the suppression of evidence related to their trial.\n\nThe men spent decades in prison and were paroled in the 1980s.\n\nThe money will be equally divided between Aziz and Islam’s estate.\n\nCyrus Vance, Jr who was District Attorney at the time of Malcolm’s assassination has apologized for law enforcement’s “serious, unacceptable violations of law and the public trust.\n\nThe New York City Law Department said Sunday that the financial agreement “brings some measure of justice to individuals who spent decades in prison and bore the stigma of being falsely accused of murdering an iconic figure.”\n\nMalcolm was shot in Upper Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom.\n\nSome information in this report came from The Associated Press