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The Office of the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia is unique among the 94 United States Attorney Offices across the nation by virtue of its size and its varied responsibilities. It is the largest United States Attorney's Office with over 350 Assistant United States Attorneys and over 350 support personnel. The size of this Office is the result of the breadth of our responsibility for criminal law enforcement and our location in the nation's capital. We are responsible not only for the prosecution of all federal crimes, but also for the prosecution of all serious local crime committed by adults in the District of Columbia. In addition, we represent the United States and its departments and agencies in civil proceedings filed in federal court in the District of Columbia. As the principal prosecutor for all criminal offenses in this jurisdiction, and as the principal litigator for the United States in the nation's capital, this Office offers extensive litigation experience before over 100 judges in the federal and local courts and unique opportunities for important public service. This significant responsibility of the public prosecutor was aptly described by Justice Sutherland in Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 88 (1935):
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The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. As such, he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the twofold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor -- indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one.
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