Turkey’s Constitutional Court (AYM), the highest legal authority in the country, made a unanimous decision on June 18, ruling that the lower courts’ verdict — convicting retired and serving military officers of plotting a coup to bring down the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) government in 2003 under a plan code-named "Sledgehammer" — had violated their right to fair trial. Since this landmark decision, all 237 officers behind bars in relation to the Sledgehammer case have been released.

This case started in January 2010, when an unidentified person delivered a suitcase containing 6,000 confidential documents somehow taken from the 1st Army Command to journalist Mehmet Baransu of Taraf, a Turkish daily that has taken a sharp critical stance against the military since the paper's founding in 2007. The newspaper immediately published the story, which alleged that there were plans to blow up at least two major mosques during Friday prayers; assassinate some Christian and Jewish leaders; and shoot down a Turkish warplane and blame it on Greece, Turkey’s historic rival. Taraf reported that the conspirators hoped the chaos would lead to calls for a military takeover and planned to turn stadiums into open-air prisons capable of holding tens of thousands detainees. The paper turned all these documents over to the state prosecutor in Istanbul, forming the foundation of the Sledgehammer case.

Speaking after the judgment to Hurriyet and Milliyet, AYM President Hasim Kilic stressed the unanimous nature of the court’s decision, which upheld the importance of basic rights and freedoms. “With the Constitutional Court’s ruling that their right to fair trial is violated, this case will be [rebuilt] from scratch,” he said. “We found discrepancies in the assessment of the local court in analyzing the CDs, hard discs and similar materials as evidence. We determined those discrepancies as a violation of rights. Moreover, we also decided the court’s refusal to hear two key witnesses was an abuse of rights. We were not convinced of the rightful decision-making of the court while denying the repeated request of the defense teams for them to listen to then-Chief of General Staff Gen. Hilmi Ozkok and Land Forces Commander Gen. Aytac Yalman. We were not also satisfied with the reasoning at the Court of Appeals.”

Irem Cicek, the daughter and lawyer of one the former Sledgehammer convicts, navy Col. Dursun Cicek, told Al-Monitor that once the new trial process started and the court ordered an expert report on the digital evidence, the case would be automatically dropped and that it won’t take years. Three CDs found in the suitcase delivered to Baransu formed the backbone of the prosecution’s case, and the defense teams challenged their authenticity. In addition to fonts that did not exist in 2003, the CDs contained files referring to dozens of institutions and organizations that also did not exist back then, along with many more pieces of evidence proving that they were forged. “The court refused to take into consideration all the separate, 26 expert reports we submitted, prepared by highly respected [universities and institutes] that specialized in this matter,” Cicek said.