A realization:

Laws without sufficient penalty or enforcement are harmful.

Because laws, alone, only influence good people. For example, if you ban guns, only law-abiding citizens will stop carrying guns. Criminals, who break laws for a living, will also break gun-control laws. So you ensure criminals will always have control over law-abiding citizens in every situation.

If you ban torture, even when there is a ticking bomb, only a law-abiding administration would obey the ban. Such a law is of no use for stopping a president with real intentions on dictatorship, because that kind of person would have no more problem breaking this law than any other. So it ties the hands of good people while doing nothing to stop abuses.

So what does influence criminals? Penalties.

Laws against murder are more effective at saving lives if they are backed by a death penalty. Laws against theft are only effective if backed by near-certain prosecution and sufficient punishment. The criminal cares not one whit for the law, but they care quite a bit about the possibility of being punished.

Further, laws without sufficient punishment reward bad people and punish good people. At work, for example, it is banned to use the Internet for personal reasons. No news, no checking e-mail, no using Google Maps to find locate a store near work so you can go shopping. All are technically possible, yet all are banned. So while a few obey these laws, and cannot even find the location or phone number of a nearby store to visit after work, others feel free to read news, blogs, and communicate with friends all day long.

Because there is no enforcement or penalty, the kind of people who break the rules benefit, and the kind of people who try to obey them are continually punished. And because nearly everyone breaks it, the bad law will stay in effect, and only be invoked abitrarily and capriously.