So was repealing the law an accommodation to criminals?

I don't believe that it was. Our nation has a history of nonsensical laws that were passed and repealed. I think it's all part of the process of moving into democracy. All to often, when we look at our history as a nation (especially our more recent history), we tend to forget how young our country is. A lot of laws were passed very early on in our nation for one reason or another (prohibition was likely a form of 'controlling' the masses from becoming belligerently drunk and causing problems) and were repealed when they were no longer necessary. Along the same lines as prohibition- playing pinball machines was illegal in most major cities from their inception in the 1930s until the mid 1970s. In some places, Pinball is still (on the books) against the law. Our nation's legislators believed them to be a form of gambling and ran by the mafia. What I'm getting at here is that there are plenty of laws that have been passed that are ridiculous and I don't think that they're repealed because of the number of people breaking the law but rather the realization that perhaps the law was never necessary in the first place. If laws were going to be changed because people were breaking them, we wouldn't have speed limits.