I'd like to suggest a modification of the answer. What is happening is that the "CASE COLUMN WHEN" syntax does an equity comparision and then uses the result of that comparision, which of course fails with NULL, while the "CASE WHEN x" syntax uses the result of x. Which is why the given query returns null.

So, something like:

The CASE's statement has two alternative syntaxs, "CASE ColumnName WHEN Value" does an equity comparision between the column and the given value. This fails with NULLS unless ANSI_NULLS is off. The other syntax is "CASE WHEN EXPRESSION", which evalutes an expression (which may use any available columns) and uses the result of that expression to determine whether the condition has been met and the associated THEN used.