But with arrests quietly continuing in a dozen countries (at least one as recently as last week), it may turn out to be something more: the clearest test yet of whether, after 25 years of intense focus on this particularly disturbing set of crimes, the prosecution of child molestation has come of age.
They were preoccupied with Gitmo, developing a hugely complex new set of detention and prosecution policies, and putting out the daily fires that go along with running a 110,000-person department.
Nine months later, for reasons largely unrelated to the crisis in California, Enron had collapsed, leaving thousands of employees out of work and setting off a wave of prosecutions that culminated in Thursday's verdicts.
Keir Starmer: 8 February The director of public prosecutions told the Inquiry that a set of clear guidelines on prosecuting journalists would be drawn up.
It is a measure of the narrowness of legal education in England in those days that this had simply not occurred to the lawyers in the DPP's office or to the team of Treasury Counsel, a pampered, old-Etonian set of barristers who conduct major prosecutions at the Old Bailey before their inevitable elevation to its judicial benches.
A separate set of regulations from the Crown Prosecution Service bars material that shows acts such as fisting, bondage, or realistic portrayals of rape.
On April 30, 1973, just days after the first news of that burglary, which tied the Pentagon Papers case to Watergate, a set of dominoes lay on the prosecution table.
It compares the effectiveness and costs of sending minor criminals to court with using a "turning point contract", which combines a deferred prosecution with a set of conditions intended to prevent future reoffending, not unlike Mr Grayling's suspended prosecutions.
It could claim that policing the margins is difficult, in which case it should turn to the helpful set of guidelines the director of public prosecutions set out last summer.
Thousands of prosecutions were filed.
