MANY FAILED EFFORTS TO COUNT NATION'S FEDERAL CRIMINAL LAWS

WASHINGTON - For decades, the task of counting the total number of
federal criminal laws has bedeviled lawyers, academics and government
officials.

"You will have died and resurrected three times," and still be trying
to figure out the answer, said Ronald Gainer, a retired Justice
Department official.

In 1982, while at the Justice Department, Mr. Gainer oversaw what
still stands as the most comprehensive attempt to tote up a number.
The effort came as part of a long and ultimately failed campaign to
persuade Congress to revise the criminal code, which by the 1980s was
scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law.

Justice Department lawyers undertook "the laborious counting" of the
scattered statutes "for the express purpose of exposing the idiocy" of
the system, said Mr. Gainer, now 76 years old.

It can often be very difficult to make a call whether or not something
counts as a single crime or many. That task fell to one lawyer, Mr.
Gainer says, who read the statutes and ultimately used her judgment to
decide: If a particular act fell under multiple crime categories-such
as forms of fraud that could also be counted as theft-she had to
determine whether it could be prosecuted under each. If an offense
could be counted in either of two sections, she counted them
separately, Mr. Gainer said.

The project stretched two years. In the end, it produced only an
educated estimate: about 3,000 criminal offenses. Since then, no one
has tried anything nearly as extensive.

The Drug Abuse Prevention and Control section of the code-Title
21-provides a window into the difficulties of counting. More than 130
pages in length, it essentially pivots around two basic crimes,
trafficking and possession. But it also delves into the specifics of
hundreds of drugs and chemicals.

Scholars debate whether the section comprises two offenses or
hundreds. Reading it requires toggling between the historical
footnotes, judicial opinions and other sections in the same title. It
has also been amended 17 times.

In 1998, the American Bar Association performed a computer search of
the federal codes looking for the words "fine" and "imprison," as well
as variations. The ABA study concluded the number of crimes was by
then likely much higher than 3,000, but didn't give a specific estimate.

"We concluded that the hunt to say, 'Here is an exact number of
federal crimes,' is likely to prove futile and inaccurate," says James
Strazzella, who drafted the ABA report. The ABA felt "it was enough to
picture the vast increase in federal crimes and identify certain
important areas of overlap with state crimes," he said.

None of these studies broached the separate-and equally
complex-question of crimes that stem from federal regulations, such
as, for example, the rules written by a federal agency to enforce a
given act of Congress. These rules can carry the force of federal
criminal law. Estimates of the number of regulations range from 10,000
to 300,000. None of the legal groups who have studied the code have a
firm number.

"There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be
indicted for some federal crime," said John Baker, a retired Louisiana
State University law professor who has also tried counting the number
of new federal crimes created in recent years. "That is not an
exaggeration."