The courts
evidence
Anything offered to prove or disprove a fact at trial: testimony, documents, records, physical objects. What counts is governed by rules, not by relevance alone.
In full
The rules of evidence exclude a great deal that is genuinely informative, including most hearsay and material obtained unconstitutionally, on the theory that reliability and fairness matter more than completeness. This is why a trial record can look narrower than the public account of the same events, and why the two often diverge.
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A plain-language explanation for civic education, not legal advice. When in doubt, the official source named above controls.