Scotland Yard and prosecutors face demands to justify a multi-million pound investigation into tabloid newspapers after the final two journalists were found not guilty.
Chris Pharo, news editor of The Sun, and Jamie Pyatt, a reporter, were cleared at the Old Bailey of aiding a police officer to commit misconduct in a public office by paying him for information.
The verdicts bring to a close a string of trials in which juries consistently opted to clear journalists of wrongdoing over their dealings with police officers and other public officials.
Scotland Yard’s Operation Elveden investigation into allegedly unlawful payments led to 27 journalists being charged but has resulted in just two convictions.
Nine outstanding prosecutions were dropped in April after the Court of Appeal overturned two convictions because juries had not been told they had to consider if the journalists were acting in the public interest.
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Mr Pharo, 46, and Mr Pyatt, 52, questioned why taxpayers’ money had been spent on prosecuting journalists for “doing their job”.
Mr Pharo said: “How could anyone imagine spending more than £30 million over four years prosecuting journalists for doing their job was remotely in the public interest?”
Mr Pyatt, a Thames Valley district reporter, added: “The head has finally been chopped off the Elveden dragon. It’s gone. It should never have been there in the first place. It’s disgraceful.”
He criticised the decision to tie up 80 Metropolitan Police officers who he said should have been on the streets.
The Old Bailey heard that Simon Quinn, a Surrey police officer, had been paid £10,000 by The Sun for tips on investigations including the murder of schoolgirl Milly Dowler, “trophy rapist” Tony Imiela and quadruple killer Daniel Gonzalez.
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Quinn admitted misconduct in public office between 2002 and 2011 and was jailed for 18 months earlier this year.
The Sun journalists denied encouraging the officer to breach his professional duty.
Mr Pyatt insisted that the information he received was all in the “public interest” and there was “nothing in there so confidential and secret the public don’t have a right to read it”.
Mr Pharo told the court his only involvement was valuing some of Mr Pyatt’s stories and passing the reporter’s requests for cash payments to his Surrey police source up the editorial chain for authorisation.
He complained that his former editor Rebekah Brooks was “back in her job” as chief executive of what is now News UK while he was answering questions about the affair in court. News UK is the parent company of The Times.
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Nigel Rumfitt, QC, who defended Mr Pharo, told the court after the verdicts that there had been a “monumental error of judgment” in pursuing a retrial after a jury in Kingston failed to reach verdicts earlier this year.
Journalists’ confidential sources came to light in the midst of the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World of 2011 when News International handed over millions of emails to police.
The two convictions of journalists resulting from Operation Elveden are Anthony France, a crime reporter for The Sun who is appealing his guilty verdict while Dan Evans, a reporter for the News of the World, pleaded guilty. Neither man was jailed.
The operation also led to the arrest of 80 public officials and the conviction of 26, including police and prison officers and civil servants. Seven people are awaiting trial and four have been acquitted.
The Crown Prosecution Service defended its decision to seek a retrial.
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It said in a statement: ‘It is right that a jury, rather than the CPS, decides whether a defendant is guilty or not.
“The CPS is duty-bound to prosecute cases which provide a realistic prospect of conviction and are in the public interest.
“This case in particular involved allegations of multiple payments to a corrupt public official in areas where the public should generally expect confidentiality.”
Scotland Yard and the CPS have cost the public purse more than £20 million in their own budgets, court fees and legal aid payments.
The Met alone has run up a bill of £12.4 million as it arrested about 90 people and interviewed a further 60 as criminal suspects. Lawyers said the cash-strapped CPS had a “money no object” approach to Elveden.
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John Butterfield, QC, who represented Lucy Panton, former News of the World crime editor, when she had her conviction for paying public officials quashed by the Court of Appeal: “It is extraordinary and troubling in a supposedly free society to have journalists on trial for articles written in good faith during the course of their job.
“We need journalists to be brave, we need them to be pushing at the edges.”