After being released from pretrial detention on Aug. 22 and transferred to a military hospital, ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak returned to court on Aug. 25 to continue his ongoing trial for the killing of more than 800 protesters during the Jan. 25 Revolution, which deposed him. The case, which has been delayed again until Sept. 14, remains unresolved after judges granted an appeal from Mubarak’s representation against the June 2012 decision sentencing Mubarak and his former interior minister, Habib al-Adly, to life sentences.

In a particularly despondent few weeks for any hope of justice against the prerevolution state, Mubarak was also acquitted of corruption charges last week.

Sahar Aziz, a professor at Texas A&M University School of Law and president of the Egyptian-American Rule of Law Association, said in an interview with Al-Monitor that many lawyers were not surprised by the acquittal. Aziz said the problem is rooted in both law and politics. An underlying structural problem of the legal system is that the prosecutor general’s office is both responsible for prosecuting as well as gathering evidence. Common in alternative legal systems, the tasks are divided as the government investigative agency is responsible for evidence gathering, whereas the public prosecutor is charged with arguing the case.

The prosecutor general responsible for the Mubarak case was Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, a leftover from the Mubarak regime notorious for corruption and doing the regime’s political “dirty work.”