The Defenders

I bought this up during Iron Fist, but it's relevant here as well: in absence of credible evidence of a person's death, Matt would have to be missing for seven years in order to be declared dead.

However, for the purposes of his loft, his landlord doesn't care if he's alive or dead. He cares about whether Matt's making his rent payments. The place can sit disused for thirty years as long as the checks keep coming in on time, but if Matt's missing for long enough to miss payments and nobody steps up to make them in his place, he's getting booted.

It seems unlikely that Foggy or someone would make the payments in Matt's name in the hopes of, what, having a place for his ghost to haunt? Foggy and Karen both believe him to be dead, so they'll be making arrangements for him and part of that is breaking off any financial obligations he has. Cheaply priced or not, Matt's corpse doesn't need a loft.

That said, Matt's disappearance is another reason why it's utterly asinine for Defenders to presume Luke and Jessica would totally walk free at the end. Even if we ignore the fact that they set off a bombing that brought down a skyscraper in post-9/11 NYC, they were the last people to see Matt Murdock alive. The police were hunting them on the presumption that they had abducted Matt, and now Matt is legally considered missing and possibly dead.

Luke and Jessica are the prime suspects in the Missing Persons case of Matt Murdock.

edited 12th Dec '17 2:30:13 PM by TobiasDrake

I suppose Foggy might want to keep Matt's loft for the same basic reasons he doesn't want anyone to look too closely at the disappearance of Matt Murdock at exactly the same time as the Devil of Hell's Kitchen. They're going to tapdance pretty fast to bounce back from where the Defenders left their show in particular. It'd actually be a lot easier if there'd been some crowds around, some collateral damage and a followup to the initial quake, some other people hurt throughout the city. It'd be less triumphant for the heroes, but it'd mean there'd been some stakes and it'd provide an easy explanation for Matt's disappearance and return. 'John Doe wanders into a convent, delirious' is an easier sell if the city had been in chaos all through the night. Hell, they pulled it off with the bombings in DD 1.

However, for the purposes of his loft, his landlord doesn't care if he's alive or dead. He cares about whether Matt's making his rent payments. The place can sit disused for thirty years as long as the checks keep coming in on time, but if Matt's missing for long enough to miss payments and nobody steps up to make them in his place, he's getting booted.

Yeah, that's exactly what Bobby Fish had said in Luke Cage following Pop's death, when Luke inquired about what it would take to keep the barbershop open: "No one's gonna be asking questions and shutting things down as long as things are paid for on time. Why do you think so many people get Grandma's house without having to fill out extra paperwork or hire a lawyer? You pay the bills, people shut up and get on with things."

The writing team will make some explanation about how Matt's able to keep his apartment despite his lengthy absence, if that's the avenue they decide to take. And we won't know how long the absence will be because we don't know how long the timeline gaps between the shows are.

edited 13th Dec '17 1:59:43 PM by dmcreif

I think Foggy's worrying too much about the Devil of Hell's Kitchen going missing. It's not like Matt has nightly meetings with Commissioner Gordon on the roof of the local precinct. He's a shadowy vigilante who sometimes appears to beat the shit out of thugs in a small neighborhood. No one's going to have any idea when, exactly, he disappeared.

We aren't exactly talking about a public figure who's heavily involved in the community like the Hero of Harlem. It'll be like half a year later when someone's like, "Hey, have you heard any sightings of that Devil guy in a while?" "Uh, no?" "Huh. Wonder if someone shot him." And that will be the end of it.

edited 13th Dec '17 2:51:09 PM by TobiasDrake

That's pretty depressing to me.

It comes with being The Cowl. Unless you're Batman and end up somehow getting the additional gig of being a super-visible public figure in addition to (supposedly) being a shadowy, mysterious vigilante.

The criminals might be able to piece it together. Dumb Crooks are a thing and Daredevil had been operating quietly if at all for a while, but still, the day a whole building falls straight through the ground has a way of drawing attention to the date. Not saying it *will* happen, but if Danny's right there and willing to draw out the ruse, better safe than sorry.

It's also a bit awkward to be worrying about a dead man's secret identity in the first place. Foggy's worried about two things happening if Matt's uncovered, and they're both silly.

He's worried that if Matt's ID is discovered, that both Matt and Foggy will lose their licenses to practice law. However, this would only have any kind of blowback on Foggy if it can be legally proven that he knew about it. All Foggy has to do is disavow knowledge of Matt's activities, and that's not hard to do.

His other concern is that it would cause blowback on all of Matt's cases, and if Matt was a prosecutor, this would absolutely be a point of concern. The people Matt put in jail would be appealing like crazy. Every single trial he was involved in would have to be re-examined to determine whether his conflict of interest had interfered with the accused's right to due process.

Matt, however, is a defense attorney. His clients are people accused of crimes. Legally, once a Not Guilty verdict has been rendered, the defendant can never again be called to stand trial for the same crime.

It's called Double Jeopardy. It doesn't matter if their attorney turns out to be a vigilante, a verdict of Not Guilty cannot, under any circumstances, ever be revoked. His clients are fine.

That's why prosecutors have to have all their ducks in a row before they take a case to trial, and why they love plea bargains so much. You get as many shots at a Not Guilty verdict as the legal system is willing to grant, but you only get one shot at Guilty. You f*ck it up, the accused walks, and you can never try again.

edited 14th Dec '17 12:14:08 PM by TobiasDrake

Legally, yes. But might there be a difference when it comes to the court of public opinion? I mean, yeah, that's not, strictly speaking, his job, but it wasn't his job to help Mrs. Cardenas with her plumbing either, and yet he did it anyway.

The complexities of whether or not Matt's vigilante actions voilated due process are intricate and shrouded in legalese. They aren't going to make a very exciting headline, so the court of public opinion is unlikely to care much about his actual cases.

"MATT MURDOCK; DAREDEVIL" is a fine enough headline, but so far as the layman's concerned, the buck stops with him. Unless it's a really high-profile case, the public attention span stops caring about criminal trials at the arrest.

The public's going to be more excited to learn about the personal life of this masked vigilante than they are about any case he's ever been involved with, with the possible exception of Frank Castle's.

edited 14th Dec '17 12:19:24 PM by TobiasDrake

Well, what about those who did at least know the people that Matt had gotten off, and might have questions if it turned out that he was Daredevil? Might they be able to make his former clients' lives difficult?

And you could always have someone deliberately making an issue out of it somehow. I think it's pretty easy to rile people up these days if you know how.

Matt isn't just a defence attorney. He also sues on the behalf of his clients. Those cases could be reopened if the ones he won against claim that he used illegal means to get to evidence, right?

That's certainly possible. At the very least, anyone that's received a civil judgment issued against them in a case where Murdock was representing the plaintiff would have grounds to appeal, citing Murdock's conflict of interest for practicing law in the same area where he's operating as a vigilante.

Were he practicing law in a different district, this wouldn't be an issue at all, mind you. There would be no potential conflict between his vigilante actions in New York and his legal cases in New Jersey. But for reasons that are entirely sensible, both of his activities occur in the same place. So it's a problem.

That said, I'm not sure there would be grounds to challenge any evidence in those cases. A lawyer is not a police officer, and has no legal right to search and seize property. Anything Matt couldn't have gotten legally as an attorney wouldn't have been admissible in civil court in the first place, DareDevil or no DareDevil.

But the financial burden of being dragged back into a courtroom could still be too much for some of his clients, especially if they have to find a new attorney to represent them in the appeal case.

edited 14th Dec '17 2:41:45 PM by TobiasDrake

Matt sueing parties on behalf of his clients would be civil cases, where (most) restrictions on admissibility of evidence don't apply.

edit:I'm neither a lawyer nor a US citizen or resident, so I claim no authority on the matter, but wouldn't it just not matter where the evidence came from? If Matt broke the law to obtain evidence, and uses that evidence in court, he could be charged for breaking those laws, but it shouldn't matter for the original case, right?

edited 14th Dec '17 2:46:37 PM by JOZeldenrust

I can't remember if Matt ever coerced anybody to do anything in court as Daredevil, or if his actions against characters in general ever pushed them to do anything legally problematic.

edited 14th Dec '17 2:47:17 PM by KnownUnknown

No, unlawfully obtained evidence is inadmissible in court. If it was admissible, then search and seizure laws would cease to matter; an officer would be able to kick in your door without warrant, take all your things, and then face a mild slap on the wrist for violating protocol while the prosecution leafs through it for anything that could be relevant.

Requiring that evidence be legally obtained in order to submit it to the court forces participants of legal proceedings to play by the rules.

EDIT: Wait, never mind. This only applies in criminal cases. Civil cases don't care where the evidence came from, so Matt being a vigilante would have no bearing on the evidence.

edited 14th Dec '17 4:20:31 PM by TobiasDrake

There was Healy, who mysteriously ended up impaled on a fence after Nelson & Murdock got him acquitted, which was a little suspicious at the time (always wondered why nobody tried to pin that on the Man in Black) and always (intentionally) morally suspect, as a link in the chain in terms of Daredevil bringing Fisk down. For the most part Matt seems like he works pretty hard at trying to keep his alter ego out of the courtroom, but like Foggy points out, listening to people's heartbeats and knowing whether or not they're lying is a massive invasion of privacy.

edited 14th Dec '17 11:19:00 PM by Unsung

Changing topics, while still focusing on Matt, how do you think the events of The Punisher would've unfolded if Matt hadn't "died"? Would he team up with Frank at some point when helping him find Micro? Would he be saving Karen from Lewis? Would he talk Lewis into surrendering to the police and then get Foggy to defend Lewis (culminating in Lewis getting committed)?

And to elaborate on what I'd said a few pages back on why I want Matt to let Karen and Foggy know he's alive as soon as possible: I feel bad for Foggy and Karen since they'll be left thinking that Matt must be dead, for however much time passes in-show until season 3 of Daredevil. And we have no idea how long this gap will be, whether it'll be a full year, or they'll start condensing the timeline to allow these Netflix shows to happen simultaneously (making the wait much shorter). I know that Matt has a bad habit of faking his own death in the comics (to the point that it seems like faking his own death is the go-to solution whenever things are falling apart for him), but this cliche of a superhero thinking "I must separate myself from the people I love in order to protect him" has been done to death in other works and I want the show to not go that way for the sake of cheap drama.

I don't think Frank would come to Matt for help, but if he did, Matt might have helped him track David to his hideout. But that wouldn't change anything in the grand scheme of things: so Frank finds David a couple days earlier than in canon, no big deal.

As for the Lewis situation, I feel like Matt could only escalate it and possibly make it worse. Lewis had his reasons to trust Frank, or at the very least to hear what Frank wants to say. Lewis even shared a crucial bit of information (white wire), which Frank later used to help Karen get out of trouble. But Lewis had no reason to try and listen to the Daredevil/random blind guy he sees for the first time in his life. And I don't think anyone would be able to talk Lewis into surrendering: if Curtis, someone who had a personal connection with Lewis, couldn't do it, why would Matt be able to?

All in all, I don't think Matt would influence the events of "The Punisher" in any meaningful way. Frank would most likely refuse to work with him, since he wants the criminals killed and has every reason to believe Matt would try to stop him instead of helping.

For anyone else maybe. But this being Foggy I can see him feeling the need to confess to being in on Matt's vigilantism if only because he'd feel too guilty about throwing his friend under the boss while his own career and reputation stayed intact.

And I don't think anyone would be able to talk Lewis into surrendering: if Curtis, someone who had a personal connection with Lewis, couldn't do it, why would Matt be able to?

Well I mean, I'd assumed that Matt would have tried to do the same sort of thing that Foggy did with those two gangbangers in the emergency room in DD 2x03. Or alternately, that Matt would've disarmed Lewis before he could have taken Karen hostage.

Or maybe Matt or Foggy would have had a scene playing the “my client has rights” card at the Homeland Security office when Frank and/or David were debriefing Dinah.

(I'll go on to say that it's kinda upsetting to me that Matt wasn't mentioned once in any of Frank's interactions with Karen. I kinda wished she'd mention Matt so that way we could know for certain - rather than it only be implied - that Frank figured out Matt is Daredevil during DDS 2)

Come Daredevil season 3, my biggest question is what would Matt think of her choices in the whole Lewis matter?

edited 16th Dec '17 9:27:12 AM by dmcreif

True, but I don't think Matt would let him do that either.

The thing is, I really think Foggy could believably level the storm: I mean, my best friend, who is blind, is secretly a ninja with super senses. WHO ON EARTH WOULD BELIEVE THAT? Matt's entire story is so crazy that I honestly think Foggy could bullshit his way out of it by sheer virtue of how ridiculous it sounds. No one would hear the story and think of course he knew. How could he not? They say, yeah, no one would see that coming. This is especially true with Matt's secretiveness.

Hell, Foggy could honestly say that, when he knew Matt in college, and when they opened Nelson and Murdock that he was totally unaware of Matt's powers or his status as the Masked Man / Devil of Hell's Kitchen. If someone asked him if he learned afterwards, he could say yes, but still possibly swing it as only learning during the course of any sort of reveal about Matt, as in, he found out when everyone else did.

It would be close, but it would be possible.

Much different than in the comics where Matt is the worst at having a secret identity and pretended that his fictitious twin brother was Daredevil for a while

Yes yes. We all know about Mike Murdoch. T'was the silver age man. That's all I'm gonna say.

Though I'm baffled at how someone with a damn near perfect alibi could still suck so much at keeping his identity.

Matt being 100% legally blind is the only thing keeping his secret identity halfway intact in the comics. For the more evidence people get on him, all tests conducted on Matt confirm the obvious: he's blind, and there's no evidence he's superhuman (apparently his enhanced senses are very hard to test out). There's likewise little evidence DD is superhuman for the most part, so the numbers just don't add up and Matt is able to get by on Plausible Deniability.