An Exoneration of Convenience

 

December 7, 2021

 

The sudden death of Malikah Shabazz on November 23 was an emotional shock to millions around the globe. Malikah and her twin sister, Malaak, were the youngest of six girls when their father, Malcolm X (Shabazz), was assassinated in 1965. Her death was all the more poignant because it came a few days after the New York Supreme Court announced the exoneration of Thomas 15 X Johnson and Norman 3X Butler, two of three men convicted in 1966 for killing Malcolm.

   The exoneration of Johnson and Butler was a surprise to almost no one familiar with recent events in the bizarre quest to dismiss legally and morally just convictions. Johnson and Butler exhibited immense chutzpah in proclaiming their innocence. Both were arrested less than a week after the February 21 assassination of Malcolm X. At the time of the arrest, both men were on bond in the shooting of Benjamin Brown, another Black Muslim who broke with the Nation of Islam to start his own cult.

 

 

 

 

  The Innocence Project entered the Johnson-Butler fight for exoneration following the release of “Who Killed Malcolm X,” a six-part Netflix documentary which aired in 2020. The series was based on a fallacy about neither man being present at the Audubon Ballroom the day Malcolm lost his life to three armed assassins.

   Thomas Johnson, who died in 2009, testified in the 1966 trial that he was at home with his leg elevated at the time of the assassination, which occurred shortly after three o’clock during a rally attended by approximately 300 people. Oddly enough, Butler claimed that he too was at home with his leg elevated at the time of the assassination.

   If the alibis sound suspicious to you, welcome to reality. The odds of two running buddies and Muslim enforcers from the same mosque being laid up with leg injuries on the date that the man they hated was killed were about a billion to one. The jury convicted both men at the end of a trial lasting nearly three months. The difference between Johnson’s alibi and Butler’s is that Johnson had medical records as evidence showing that he had been in the hospital several times in the past two years for circulatory problems in his right leg.

 Butler could produce no evidence establishing that he was disabled at any time prior to the assassination. His defense attorneys called a physician who claimed that he had treated Butler for a leg injury around the time of the assassination, but when pressed for specifics, the doctor admitted that he had not treated Butler for the injuries until five days after the assassination.

 

 

 

  Butler’s motive in seeking exoneration is clear. He had become a pariah to his many in his family. Indeed, he confessed that some of his children were ashamed of him for his reported role in the assassination, and for which he served twenty years in prison.

   Based on statements by Benjamin Goodman [Karim], most scholars concluded decades ago that Johnson and Butler were framed. In the last decade, however, the claim has proved false. During a series of interviews, Johnson admitted on the record to this writer that he was aware of at least two teams of assassins in the ballroom on that fateful day, while denying his own presence. When I asked him why he was so certain of it, he replied that once Nation of Islam officials confirmed that security around Malcolm X would be lax on February 21, they decided to send in teams of assassins. “It was decided that Malcolm was not going to leave the ballroom alive that day,” he said.

   Earlier this year, I discovered why Johnson was so sure that at least two teams of assassins were present in the Audubon. Johnson’s medical records from Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx reveal that most of the men whom Thomas Hagan, the only assassin arrested at the scene, visited Johnson on several occasions after the assassination but before his trial which began in January 1966 and ended two months later. Johnson, Butler, and Hagan were found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to life terms.

  Goodman, who was cowering behind stage like most of the men who should have been protecting Malcolm and his family that day, insisted that Johnson and Butler could not have been in the Audubon Ballroom during the assassination. He was adamant that he or other top aides would have recognized them had either man been present. This is a ridiculously self-serving opinion, since Goodman makes no mention of the three men on the center front row who were hiding their faces behind newspapers moments before the assassination.

 

 

 

 

   Sharon 6X Poole, and teenager with whom Goodman was having an extramarital affair, was appalled by the latter’s statements. Unlike Goodman, Poole was a couple of feet away from Malcolm X when the gunmen struck. She positively identified Norman Butler as the man in the brown suit holding an overcoat over his arm as he fired a handgun toward the assembly during his escaped. Another woman who was a few feet from the stage, Yuri Kochiyama, also identified Butler as one of the assassins. Despite these eyewitness accounts, sloppy scholars have decided that they were mistaken and that Goodman, who was not an eyewitness, was more credible.

 

 

 

    Thus, with questionable black scholarship in Johnson and Butler’s favor, the Innocence Project took on the latter’s case. In addition, author Davis Garrow has been pressing the federal government and the state of New York to release the unredacted files on Malcolm X. Since there is abundant proof of federal and state involvement in the assassination of Malcolm X, an obvious decision was made to exonerate the two men.

   Why? Because it meant that the New York Police Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence would not have to release their covert files on Malcolm X. Moreover, it wasn’t an abortion of justice in their eyes since both men served a full life sentence following their conviction for the assassination. There was no public outcry because most of Malcolm X’s daughters were duped into believing that Johnson and Butler were framed. Some of them appeared on stage at the Audubon one year ago when the Netflix series debuted.

   The end result is that Butler’s exoneration is a Pyrrhic victory, an exoneration of convenience. Sure, he may fool his family for a while into believing that he was framed, but anyone with an iota of common sense will know better. He will likely file a wrongful conviction suit against New York and probably laugh all the way to the bank with a million dollars or two. But history, for what it’s worth (and that isn’t much these days), will prove that Johnson and Butler got exactly what they deserved in 1966: a life [sentence] for a life.

 

Scenes From A Homicide: Note these still frames of a man fitting Butler's description which were captured outside the Audubon Ballroom moments after the assassination of Malcolm X.