Picture this: a man stands in the dock. His palms are open. His brow is furrowed. His eyes? Hollow, not from guilt but from sheer exhaustion. He has stood here before. Many times. This time, the judge is different, the charge sheet reworded, the file freshly stamped. The crime? Identical. The accused? The same. The evidence? Immovable. Only the stage lights altered. The script remains dreadfully familiar.

Welcome to Pakistan’s post 26th Amendment judicial theatre—May 9 edition. A production patently violating the double jeopardy principle. So farcical that even Orwell would find its grotesque predictability tiresome. A political theatre masquerades as jurisprudence, choreographed by the state, featuring the same recycled accusations, duplicate FIRs, and the revolving cast of familiar defendants. The audience is expected to applaud. But justice, unfortunately, is not a Netflix or Amazon Prime series. It doesn't get better with each mechanical reprise.

Behold the plot: individuals, mainly PTI leadership, accused of gathering at the abominable alleged Zaman Park Meeting to hatch a criminal conspiracy on May 9th. Admittedly, all participants of the aforementioned meeting have already faced trial either in Lahore, Faisalabad or Sargodha. Some were convicted. Some were acquitted. As per the principle of double jeopardy, end of story, right? Not in this charade. Cue the Encore: The Return of the Trial in More 9th May FIRs—now playing in judicial cinemas in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Sargodha, Faisalabad, Mianwali, and other cities. The cast remains steadfast, the lines identical, same dialogues, same story. Only the legal costumes have been swapped out for fresh but equally hollow attire.

And then, the pièce de résistance, the star witnesses stride in: two police constables of such remarkable auditory prowess that, while entering the Zaman Park residence of Imran Khan, they claim to have overheard the entire criminal conspiracy unfolding inside. Not content with such mere happenstance, they further report, with commendable heroism, to have continued their surveillance from beneath a table apparently invisible, inaudible, and in possession of ears so finely tuned they would shame the great Sherlock Holmes himself. These two stalwarts, it must be noted, serve as the state’s star witnesses in every single May 9 trial, proving that in this drama, not only the accused, the charges, and the........

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