For the officers in prison, and their families and lawyers, the turn of events has created the tantalizing possibility of new trials and, ultimately perhaps, exoneration. But they are proceeding with caution, saying that they do not fully trust the intentions of Mr. Erdogan and that he was complicit all along, having embraced the trials as an important part of his agenda.

“At the end of the day, this is an opportunity for us,” said Nil Kutluk, the daughter of a navy admiral who is in prison. “Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that the corruption allegations should be covered up. But personally there is nothing more important for me than my father and other innocent people getting out as soon as possible. We are talking about people in their 60s who are losing days of their lives behind bars.”

On a recent afternoon, stacks of red, blue and green binders that detail some of this questionable evidence were piled high on a conference table in the office of Celal Ulgen, a lawyer who represents several of those convicted in the military trials, including Cetin Dogan, a former army general who was said to be the ringleader of the coup plot.

“I don’t have hope,” Mr. Ulgen said. “I’m just doing my job. Every time I’ve done this in the past it’s been like playing a game of table tennis against the wall. It just keeps coming back.”

He said he would submit the binders to a court in Istanbul as part of a new effort to gain retrials for his clients and hundreds of others.

The sprawling investigations and court cases against the military officers and other members of Turkey’s old secular elite were largely divided in two. One was called Sledgehammer, a reference to the code-name of the supposed coup plot, while the other was called Ergenekon, named for what was said to be a shadowy “deep state” organization that carried out conspiracies in the name of protecting secularism.

Jared Genser, a human rights lawyer in Washington who has taken on the military defendants’ case pro bono, and whose filing to the United Nations resulted in a determination that the officers were being detained in violation of international law, said: “In the case of Sledgehammer, both the Gulenists and the A.K.P. were on the same page. Of course, Erdogan knew about it and was complicit.”