A legal battle against a judge's order to hand over notes of an interview with a man charged with murdering the Belfast solicitor, Mr Pat Finucane, 10 years ago has been won by Mr Ed Moloney, Northern editor of the Sunday Tribune.
In yesterday's reserved judgment, the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Robert Carswell, and Mr Justice Kerr quashed a decision by the Belfast Recorder, Judge Anthony Hart, ordering Mr Moloney to hand over his interview notes.
Judge Hart made the ruling at the request of an RUC inspector following a fresh investigation of the Finucane murder by a team led by Mr John Stevens.
The Stevens team was brought in by the RUC Chief Constable, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, after allegations of collusion between the security forces and Mr Finucane's UFF killers.
Yesterday's judgment followed a two-day hearing last month when Mr Moloney applied for a judicial review of Judge Hart's decision, on the grounds that to comply with it would jeopardise his career and be a breach of journalistic ethics.
In his 19-page judgment Sir Robert Carswell said Judge Hart had either misapprehended the evidence of Det Chief Insp Turner, a member of the Stevens team, or had misdirected himself.
Sir Robert said: "Mr Turner did not or could not say that the notes made by Mr Moloney would be likely to contain any material which would advance the investigation.
"He could not produce any ground for his expressed hope that there would be any more enlightening reference in the notes to the persons whose initials were contained in the article [written by Mr Moloney and published after Stobie was charged last June].
"It is understandable that he wanted to compare them with the text of the article, in the hope that they might throw up something which would assist him.
"But he was quite unable to point to anything which might indicate that he was likely to gain anything from them."
Sir Robert said the police had to show something more than a possibility that the material would be of some use. "They must establish that there are reasonable grounds for believing that the material is likely to be of substantial value to the investigation.
"DCI Turner's evidence does not in our judgment start to meet that criterion. We consider that the judge has either misapprehended that evidence or has adopted an incorrect test in reaching his conclusion, which the evidence cannot support.
"We therefore are impelled to quash the judge's decision."