AS CRIMINAL LAWS PROLIFERATE, MORE ARE ENSNARED

Eddie Leroy Anderson of Craigmont, Idaho, is a retired logger, a
former science teacher and now a federal criminal thanks to his
arrowhead-collecting hobby.

In 2009, Mr. Anderson loaned his son some tools to dig for arrowheads
near a favorite campground of theirs. Unfortunately, they were on
federal land. Authorities "notified me to get a lawyer and a damn good
one," Mr. Anderson recalls.

There is no evidence the Andersons intended to break the law, or even
knew the law existed, according to court records and interviews. But
the law, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, doesn't
require criminal intent and makes it a felony punishable by up to two
years in prison to attempt to take artifacts off federal land without
a permit.

Faced with that reality, the two men, who didn't find arrowheads that
day, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and got a year's probation and a
$1,500 penalty each. "We kind of wonder why it got took to the level
that it did," says Mr. Anderson, 68 years old.

Wendy Olson, the U.S. Attorney for Idaho, said the men were on an
archeological site that was 13,000 years old. "Folks do need to pay
attention to where they are," she said.

The Andersons are two of the hundreds of thousands of Americans to be
charged and convicted in recent decades under federal criminal laws-as
opposed to state or local laws-as the federal justice system has
dramatically expanded its authority and reach.

As federal criminal statutes have ballooned, it has become
increasingly easy for Americans to end up on the wrong side of the
law. Many of the new federal laws also set a lower bar for conviction
than in the past: Prosecutors don't necessarily need to show that the
defendant had criminal intent.

These factors are contributing to some unusual applications of
justice. Father-and-son arrowhead lovers can't argue they made an
innocent mistake. A lobster importer is convicted in the U.S. for
violating a Honduran law that the Honduran government disavowed. A
Pennsylvanian who injured her husband's lover doesn't face state
criminal charges-instead, she faces federal charges tied to an
international arms-control treaty.

The U.S. Constitution mentions three federal crimes by citizens:
treason, piracy and counterfeiting. By the turn of the 20th century,
the number of criminal statutes numbered in the dozens. Today, there
are an estimated 4,500 crimes in federal statutes, according to a 2008
study by retired Louisiana State University law professor John Baker.

There are also thousands of regulations that carry criminal penalties.
Some laws are so complex, scholars debate whether they represent one
offense, or scores of offenses.

Counting them is impossible. The Justice Department spent two years
trying in the 1980s, but produced only an estimate: 3,000 federal
criminal offenses.

The American Bar Association tried in the late 1990s, but concluded
only that the number was likely much higher than 3,000. The ABA's
report said "the amount of individual citizen behavior now potentially
subject to federal criminal control has increased in astonishing
proportions in the last few decades."

A Justice spokeswoman said there was no quantifiable number. Criminal
statutes are sprinkled throughout some 27,000 pages of the federal
code.

There are many reasons for the rising tide of laws. It's partly due to
lawmakers responding to hot-button issues-environmental messes,
financial machinations, child kidnappings, consumer protection-with
calls for federal criminal penalties. Federal regulations can also
carry the force of federal criminal law, adding to the legal complexity.

With the growing number of federal crimes, the number of people
sentenced to federal prison has risen nearly threefold over the past
30 years to 83,000 annually. The U.S. population grew only about 36%
in that period. The total federal prison population, over 200,000,
grew more than eightfold-twice the growth rate of the state prison
population, now at 2 million, according the federal Bureau of Justice
Statistics

Tougher federal drug laws account for about 30% of people sentenced, a
decline from over 40% two decades ago. The proportion of people
sentenced for most other crimes, such as firearms possession, fraud
and other non-violent offenses, has doubled in the past 20 years.

The growth in federal law has produced benefits. Federal legislation
was indispensable in winning civil rights for African-Americans. Some
of the new laws, including those tackling political corruption and
violent crimes, are relatively noncontroversial and address
significant problems. Plenty of convicts deserve the punishment they
get.

Roscoe Howard, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia,
argues that the system "isn't broken." Congress, he says, took its cue
over the decades from a public less tolerant of certain behaviors.
Current law provides a range of options to protect society, he says.
"It would be horrible if they started repealing laws and taking those
options away."

Still, federal criminal laws can be controversial. Some duplicate
existing state criminal laws, and others address matters that might
better be handled as civil rather than criminal matters.

Some federal laws appear picayune. Unauthorized use of the Smokey Bear
image could land an offender in prison. So can unauthorized use of the
slogan "Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute."

The spread of federal statues has opponents on both sides of the
aisle, though for different reasons. For Republicans, the issue is
partly about federal intrusions into areas historically handled by
states. For Democrats, the concerns include the often lengthy prison
sentences that federal convictions now produce.

Those expressing concerns include the American Civil Liberties Union
and Edwin Meese III, former attorney general under President Ronald
Reagan. Mr. Meese, now with the conservative Heritage Foundation,
argues Americans are increasingly vulnerable to being "convicted for
doing something they never suspected was illegal."

"Most people think criminal law is for bad people," says Timothy Lynch
of Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. People don't realize
"they're one misstep away from the nightmare of a federal
indictment."

Last September, retired race-car champion Bobby Unser told a
congressional hearing about his 1996 misdemeanor conviction for
accidentally driving a snowmobile onto protected federal land,
violating the Wilderness Act, while lost in a snowstorm. Though the
judge gave him only a $75 fine, the 77-year-old racing legend got a
criminal record.

Mr. Unser says he was charged after he went to authorities for help
finding his abandoned snowmobile. "The criminal doesn't usually call
the police for help," he says.

A Justice Department spokesman cited the age of the case in declining
to comment. The U.S. Attorney at the time said he didn't remember the
case.

Some of these new federal statutes don't require prosecutors to prove
criminal intent, eroding a bedrock principle in English and American
law. The absence of this provision, known as mens rea, makes
prosecution easier, critics argue.

A study last year by the Heritage Foundation and the National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers analyzed scores of proposed
and enacted new laws for nonviolent crimes in the 109th Congress of
2005 and 2006. It found of the 36 new crimes created, a quarter had no
mens rea requirement and nearly 40% more had only a "weak" one.

Some jurists are disturbed by the diminished requirement to show
criminal intent in order to convict. In a 1998 decision, federal
appellate judge Richard Posner, a noted conservative, attacked a 1994
federal law under which an Illinois man went to prison for three years
for possessing guns while under a state restraining order taken out by
his estranged wife. He possessed the guns otherwise legally, they
posed no immediate threat to the spouse, and the restraining order
didn't mention any weapons bar.

"Congress created, and the Department of Justice sprang, a trap" on a
defendant who "could not have suspected" he was committing a crime,
Judge Posner wrote.

Another area of concern among some jurists is the criminalization of
issues that they consider more appropriate to civil lawsuits. In
December, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is considered
liberal, overturned the fraud conviction of a software-company
executive accused of helping to issue false financial statements. The
government tried "to stretch criminal law beyond its proper bounds,"
wrote the Circuit's chief judge, Alex Kozinski.

Civil law, he said, is a better tool to judge "gray area"
conduct-actions that might, or might not, be illegal. Criminal law, he
said, "should clearly separate conduct that is criminal from conduct
that is legal."

Occasionally, Americans are going to prison in the U.S. for violating
the laws and rules of other countries. Last year, Abner Schoenwetter
finished 69 months in federal prison for conspiracy and smuggling. His
conviction was related to importing the wrong kinds of lobsters and
bulk packaging them in plastic, rather than separately in boxes, in
violation of Honduran laws.

According to court records and interviews, Mr. Schoenwetter had been
importing lobsters from Honduras since the mid-1980s. In early 1999,
federal officials seized a 70,000-pound shipment after a tip that the
load violated a Honduran statute setting a minimum size on lobsters
that could be caught. Such a shipment, in turn, violated a U.S. law,
the Lacey Act, which makes it a felony to import fish or wildlife if
it breaks another country's laws. Roughly 2% of the seized shipment
was clearly undersized, and records indicated other shipments carried
much higher percentages, federal officials said.

In an interview, Mr. Schoenwetter, 65 years old, said he and other
buyers routinely accepted a percentage of undersized lobsters since
the deliveries from the fishermen inevitably included smaller ones. He
also said he didn't believe bringing in some undersized lobsters was
illegal, noting that previous shipments had routinely passed through
U.S. Customs.

After conviction, Mr. Schoenwetter and three co-defendants appealed,
and the Honduran government filed a brief on their behalf saying that
Honduran courts had invalidated the undersized-lobster law. By a
two-to-one vote, however, a federal appeals panel found the Honduran
law valid at the time of the trial and upheld the convictions.

The dissenting jurist, Judge Peter Fay, wrote: "I think we would be
shocked should the tables be reversed and a foreign nation simply
ignored one of our court rulings."

Robert Kern, a 62-year-old Virginia hunting-trip organizer, was also
prosecuted in the U.S. for allegedly breaking the law of another
country. Instead of lobsters from Honduras, Mr. Kern's troubles
stemmed from moose from Russia.

He faced a 2008 Lacey Act prosecution for allegedly violating Russian
law after some of his clients shot game from a helicopter in that
country. In the end, he was acquitted after a Russian official
testified the hunters had an exemption from the helicopter hunting
ban. Still, legal bills totaling more than $860,000 essentially wiped
out his retirement savings, Mr. Kern says.

Justice Department officials declined to comment on Messrs. Kern and
Schoenwetter.

One area of expansion has been environmental crimes. Since its
inception in 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency has grown to
enforce some 25,000 pages of federal regulations, equivalent to about
15% of the entire body of federal rules. Many of the EPA rules carry
potential criminal penalties. Krister Evertson, a would-be inventor,
recently spent 15 months in prison for environmental crimes where
there was no evidence he harmed anyone, or intended to.

In May 2004 he was arrested near Wasilla, Alaska, and charged with
illegally shipping sodium metal, a potentially flammable material,
without proper packaging or labeling.

He told federal authorities he had been in Idaho working to develop a
better hydrogen fuel cell but had run out of money. He had moved some
sodium and other chemicals to a storage site near his workshop in
Salmon, Idaho, before traveling back to his hometown of Wasilla to
raise money by gold-mining.

Mr. Evertson said he believed he had shipped the sodium legally. A
jury acquitted him in January 2006.

However, Idaho prosecutors, using information Mr. Evertson provided to
federal authorities in Alaska, charged him with violating the Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act, a 1976 federal law that regulates
handling of toxic waste. The government contended Mr. Evertson had
told federal investigators he had abandoned the chemicals. It also
said the landlord of the Idaho storage site claimed he was owed back
rent and couldn't find the inventor-allegations Mr. Evertson disputed.

Once the government deemed the chemicals "abandoned," they became
"waste" and subject to RCRA. He was charged under a separate federal
law with illegally moving the chemicals about a half-mile to the
storage site.

"If I had abandoned the chemicals, why would I have told the
investigators about them?" said Mr. Evertson in an interview. He added
that he spent $100,000 on the material and always planned to resume
his experiments.

Prosecutors emphasized the potential danger of having left the
materials for two years. "You clean up after yourself and don't leave
messes for others," one prosecutor told the jury, which convicted Mr.
Evertson on three felony counts. Prosecutors said clean-up of the site
cost the government $400,000. Mr. Evertson, 57, remains on probation,
working as night watchman in Idaho.

In a statement, Ms. Olson, the Idaho U.S. Attorney, said that by
leaving dangerous chemicals not properly attended he endangered others
and caused the government to spend more than $400,000 in clean-up
costs. "This office will continue to aggressively prosecute"
environmental crimes, she said.

Critics contend that federal criminal law is increasingly, and
unconstitutionally, impinging on the sovereignty of the states. The
question recently came before the Supreme Court in the case of Carol
Bond, a Pennsylvania woman who is fighting a six-year prison sentence
arising out of violating a 1998 federal chemical-weapons law tied to
an international arms-control treaty. The law makes it a crime for an
average citizen to possess a "chemical weapon" for other than a
"peaceful purpose." The statute defines such a weapon as any chemical
that could harm humans or animals.

Ms. Bond's criminal case stemmed from having spread some chemicals,
including an arsenic-based one, on the car, front-door handle and
mailbox of a woman who had had an affair with her husband. The victim
suffered a burn on her thumb.

In court filings, Ms. Bond's attorneys argued the chemical-weapons law
unconstitutionally intruded into what should have been a state
criminal matter. The state didn't file charges on the chemicals, but
under state law she likely would have gotten a less harsh sentence,
her attorneys said.

Last month, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled Ms. Bond has standing
to challenge the federal law. By distributing jurisdiction among
federal and state governments, the Constitution "protects the liberty
of the individual from arbitrary power," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote
for the court. "When government acts in excess of its lawful powers,
that liberty is at stake."

During oral arguments in the case, Justice Samuel Alito expressed
concern about the law's "breadth" by laying out a hypothetical
example. Simply pouring a bottle of vinegar into a bowl to kill
someone's goldfish, Justice Alito said, could be "potentially
punishable by life imprisonment."

- -Tom McGinty and Louise Radnofsky contributed to this article.