Direct evidence supports the truth of an assertion (in criminal law, an assertion of guilt or of innocence) directly, i.e., without an intervening inference. Circumstantial evidence, by contrast, consists of a fact or set of facts which, if proven, will support the creation of an inference that the matter asserted is true.
For example: a witness who testifies that he saw the defendant shoot the victim gives direct evidence. A witness who testifies that he saw the defendant fleeing the scene of the crime, or a forensics expert who says that ballistics proves that the defendant’s gun shot the bullet that killed the victim both give circumstantial evidence from which the defendants’s guilt may be inferred.
In direct evidence a witness relates what he or she directly experienced. (Usually the experience is by sight or hearing, though it may come though any sense, including touch or pain. State v Famber, 358 Mo 288, 214 SW2d 40.)
Famous quotes containing the words direct and/or evidence:
“You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it—low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion—and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“I don’t know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)