Insurance fraud is seen as such a minor crime that a lawyer claimed, as a defense to a murder charge, that "it was only insurance fraud." The fight against insurance fraud will continue unabated and without success, as long as the public and lawyers consider it to be so proper that it would be a defense to a more serious crime.

Defense Attorney Diamond''s argument in People v. Golay & Rutterschmidt (the "Black Widows" case) is one of the reasons why insurance fraud is not prosecuted. If two little old ladies can insure the lives of homeless men with themselves as beneficiaries and then be convicted of the murders of the men, whose deaths netted them about $2.8 million in insurance claims, while defending their crime by claiming that it was "only an insurance fraud scheme" is frightening. Later, Diamond even made the insurance industry, not the killers, the villains. He said: "This case is about the insurance industry retaliating against Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt," Diamond said. "They don''t like the fact that two little old ladies are involved in an insurance scam. They are going to teach them a lesson."

The jury reached the correct result by convicting both women of murder, but the criminals, and most prosecutors, know that the chance of success is much greater than the cost of getting caught. Consider the millions made by the old ladies and the billions made by lawyers recently convicted and discussed in these pages.