This question is mainly for Marvel fans, but the character Daredevil is a superhero/vigilante who’s a lawyer, mainly a defense attorney. I get he’s about upholding justice and helping the little guy, but wouldn’t it make more sense for the character to be a prosecutor or a civil rights attorney rather than a defense attorney?
I get not everyone is guilty, and a lot of people get screwed over, but let’s be honest: most of the time, defense attorneys defend people who are, more often than not, guilty of crimes. If Matt’s whole character is about justice, wouldn’t it make more sense for him to be a prosecutor, use his hearing to decide if the person is guilty or not, and achieve justice that way? Or become a civil rights attorney?
Ignoring the very useful themes of contrast and all, the idea that those accused of wrongdoing are accurately accused “more often than not” is internalized copraganda.
For every actually guilty person accused of a crime they actually and entirely committed there is someone who wasn’t – either because they didn’t do anything, didn’t do what they were accused of, or didn’t do all the parts of the crime they’re accused of.
When the system works we don’t see these people in statistics because the prosecutor drops the case as soon as a defense is raised. And when the system doesn’t work we dont see them in statistics because we can’t distinguish them from the actually guilty.
And Matt Murdock’s character, like most comic book vigilantes, is less about justice and more about the fantasy of righteous violence. If he was a prosecutor there’d be no reason to ever put on the costume.
In Japan, the conviction rate when something goes to trial is 99%. The main reason for this is that prosecutors will never bring a case to trial if they are not 100% sure they can win it. This of course has a lot of problems, from difficult to prove crimes like rape never going to trial, to the presumption of innocence when you sit in front of the judge being practically nil, to prosecutors doing everything in their power to convict after a trial starts even if it turns out they were wrong (even by withholding evidence).
Those are the reasons “innocent until proven guilty” is such an important concept to have, and it’s completely incompatible with assuming “the accused is more often than not guilty”