Often, prosecutors are called immediately after a crime and consulted about what should be done. One of the first things the Assistant United States Attorney does is contact an “investigating agency,” so that an investigator can be assigned to the case to assist in obtaining information about a person, place, or events related to the crime. In the Federal Government, there are agencies that employ investigators to collect and provide information to prosecutors.

You may already know some of the agencies, such as:

the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),	the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA),
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF),	and the United States Secret Service (USSS),

to name a few.

The investigators at these agencies explain what happened at the scene of a crime and who may have seen it, and help prosecutors understand the details of the case. The prosecutor may work with just one agency but, many times, several investigating agencies are involved.

Remember our prosecutor? At this point, after the neighborhood boys were arrested, the prosecutor got a phone call asking whether there was a “case” against them. A “case” is simply a group of facts to show that a person may have committed a crime.

After the phone call, our prosecutor called an investigating agency involved in civil rights violations. “Civil rights” include things like the right to vote, the right to be happy, and the right to live in any part of town and attend any school, regardless of your nationality, gender, or appearance. The investigating agency assigned an investigator to the case who specializes in these types of cases. To seek out the truth and search for information relating to the crime, the investigator talked to the parents of the neighborhood boys, visited their school to talk to their teachers, and spoke with as many people as possible in order to create a clear picture of what happened for the prosecutor. The prosecutor may even choose to talk to some of the same people that the investigator talked to, just to make sure he has the best understanding of exactly what happened.

Direct Evidence

After the prosecutor determines that there is a case, he uses all the statements and information he has to determine if the Government has a “strong case”—one in which all the facts lead to a specific person or persons who committed the crime. In our case, the facts lead the prosecutor to believe that the neighborhood boys beat the lost boys because they didn’t want the boys in their neighborhood. However, before the prosecutor made that conclusion, he looked at both direct and circumstantial evidence. “Direct evidence/testimony” is information provided by a witness who saw or heard the beating, or is a videotape or audiotape of someone committing a crime. In our case, the direct evidence was the statements by the lost boys who said that the neighborhood boys beat them for no reason. Additionally, a four-year old girl who watched the beating from her grandmother’s window overlooking the street, also would testify that she watched the neighborhood boys beat the other two for no reason.

The second type of evidence is “circumstantial evidence”—statement(s) or information obtained indirectly or not based on first-hand experience by a person. Circumstantial evidence includes people’s impressions about an event that happened which they didn’t see. For example, if you went to bed at night and there was no snow on the ground but you awoke to snow, while you didn’t actually see it snowing, you assume that it snowed while you slept.