Exactly 26 years since Roseanne Beckett was arrested for trying to kill her husband, she has been awarded $2.3 million plus costs for malicious prosecution.

Roseanne Beckett, formerly known as Roseanne Catt, was released from jail in 2001 after serving most of her 12-year sentence for soliciting the murder of her ex-husband, Barry Catt.

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Her conviction was quashed in 2005 by the Court of Criminal Appeal following a judicial inquiry into allegations she was framed.

After years of legal arguments she has successfully sued the state of NSW, with Justice Ian Harrison on Monday awarding her more than $2.3 million plus legal costs.

“Victory, at long last victory,” said Ms Beckett, who was in tears after the judgment was handed down.

“I have been going to bed with it for 26 years. I have woken up with it for 26 years. I have had nightmares.”

During a hearing in the matter last year, Ms Beckett told the court that she first met Detective Sergeant Peter Thomas, the man who would later prosecute her, in 1983.

He was investigating a fire at her delicatessen business in Taree in the state’s mid-north coast in late 1983.

Sgt Thomas, she said, began making a series of unwanted “suggestive” comments.

In one instance at his office, Ms Beckett said he had insisted she listen to the song Islands in the Stream, which lyrics include, “All this love we feel needs no conversation”.

“He told me it could be his and my song,” Ms Beckett recalled in 2014.

When she lodged a series of complaints with the force about Sgt Thomas’s alleged misconduct, Ms Beckett says she was harassed and eventually charged with arson herself – a case that never proceeded.

In 1987, she then married local panel beater Barry Catt, whom she says was a friend of Sgt Thomas.

In 1989, when Mr Catt was facing charges of his own, she says Sgt Thomas began investigating her.

Justice Harrison found on Monday that the evidence establishes that Detective Thomas harboured an intense dislike for Ms Beckett and that the fallout from the delicatessen fire was the cause of it.

“Detective Thomas utilised the legal system in a way that did not secure justice but perverted it,” he found.