Devil's Critic

After Mark Waid and Chris Samnee wrapped up their run on Daredevil, Charles Soule and Ron Garney took over. They promptly moved Murdock back to New York, put the secret identity genie back in the bottle (somehow), and most relevantly to this post, made Matt Murdock an assistant District Attorney.

Not having read much of the run beyond what I've seen online, I don't know Soule's purpose behind that move, other than it hadn't been done with Murdock before. But it always struck me as a bad decision, in the same way I'm not a fan of the trend of superheroes working officially as agents of the government or SHIELD or whatever. If the state already has power, which it will deploy violently and unevenly against its people, why the hell should I want to see the state have more power at its disposal? Whether that's the Vision being part of SHIELD, with all the shady shit it does, or Matt Murdock using his legal skills to put people in jail for having weed on them or whatever.

Whatever people might say about Justice being blind, and how that's a good thing, it doesn't take much looking around our world to see Justice is blind to how often it's swayed by a great many things. Money. Influence. The color of your skin. Gender. If you happen to be wearing a badge on your chest when you shoot people. If you're lacking in some of these things, or are the "wrong" one of the others, the scales are tipped against you whether you're up against another citizen, a corporation, or the state.

Superheroes are accurately criticized as protectors of the status quo, since we don't see the super-scientist solving world hunger or curbing climate change. And for all that he isn't upending the entire legal system, one thing pretty consistent about Matt Murdock is he defends people who don't have those things in their favor, who are not benefiting from the status quo. Even if he can't act directly. During the Nocenti run, he and Karen open a clinic that, among other things, allows a disbarred Matt to "ghost lawyer", so people who can't afford an attorney of his caliber can advocate for themselves and have a fighting chance. In the Waid run, he and Foggy went back to that approach. He wasn't disbarred, but everyone thinking he was Daredevil made it difficult to try a case without it getting bogged down in a lot of talk about him being a costumed vigilante.

Point being, he worked to protect people the system wasn't serving fairly, trying to give them an advantage to even the odds. You could argue that his enhanced senses, with all the clues he can gain from them, are an extra thumb on the scale to help balance things out even a little more. That was where superheroes started at, Superman using his powers to save innocent men about to die by electrocution, or busting up slumlords the law wasn't touching for one reason or another. The system is imperfect, has flaws, has gaps. People fall through, or are otherwise ill-served by it, and here's someone with the ability to address that in at least some small way, to help this person in their time of need..

I'm guessing Soule wanted to show Murdock trying to address those gaps from within, rather than without, but maybe I'm too cynical to think he would have much luck reforming things from within. he became Daredevil in part because the system wasn't working the way he thought it was meant to, while at the same time acting as a defense attorney to protect people caught up in it. Now he's working for that system? Maybe he can argue the District Attorney's office should decline to prosecute people arrested on bogus charges, or suspect searches, or push for lighter sentences for smaller crimes, but I'm not sure he can actually make those things happen.