BIOGRAPHY -- Page 46
Bruce’s money helped keep the lights on at Nelson & Murdock. With Foggy at a critical stage in his chemotherapy, Matt did his best to handle both of their caseloads, in addition to his extracurricular activities. They needed work, but Matt hesitated when one of the last people he ever wanted to see came through the door with a case. Nate Hackett, Matt’s childhood bully, wanted to hire him for a false arrest case. Nate had fallen in with a bad crowd growing up, joining the Sons of the Serpent and doing some radio engineering work for them. Nate thought they were 
just a men’s lodge and left when the Serpents got political and actively racist. However, he was recently arrested for crimes related to the Serpents’ activities after he left the group. Even though the charges were dropped, Nate lost his job and now he wanted a settlement against the city. Matt was very reluctant to work with Nate, but his conscience (and lie detector senses) told him Nate was on the up and up this time.
Matt attended Nate’s hearing as a consulting counselor, but the case proved to be far more serious than he expected. The Sons of the Serpent had gone covert, abandoning the snake motif, stormtrooper costumes to infiltrate and corrupt the system. The judge, bailiff and opposing attorney in the courtroom were all Serpents. Nate was set up because the Serpents feared that he remembered information about their upcoming radio engineering plot, based off of his original tinkering. The judge actually shot Nate during his hearing, leaving Matt to go off of guesswork to determine who in the building was secretly a Serpent and who was not. The Serpents used a frequency jammer based on Nate’s work to maintain confusion in the courthouse. Daredevil discovered both the jammer and a bomb intended to cover their tracks. Several Serpents were exposed and arrested once things calmed down, but Matt knew the corruption in the justice system ran deeper than he had uncovered thus far. [Daredevil (3rd series) #28-29]
Ever since he abandoned Shadowland, Daredevil’s stronghold of the Hand had been under the control of Wilson Fisk in Hell’s Kitchen. It was the superior Spider-Man and his army of Spiderlings who finally took action to bring down Shadowland, driving Fisk into exile. [Superior Spider-Man (1st series) #14] However, the Spider had his own “blindspot,” courtesy of the Goblin King’s software patch to his spider-bot patrolling drones. Any criminal act performed by somebody marked with the sigil of the Goblin Nation failed to register on Spider-Man’s surveillance sweeps of the city. Daredevil and Punisher sensed the shift in the city’s underworld, but Spider-Man was too egotistical to listen to the idea that he may have missed something. Still, it was hard to ignore 
when his entire Spider-Patrol was revealed to be infiltrated by Goblin Nation members. Spider-Man, Daredevil and Punisher fought to regain control of his Spider-Island headquarters, but Spider-Man’s operation was done in by his own hubris. [Superior Spider-Man Team-Up #9-10]
Matt received an irritating amount of help at Nelson & Murdock when Foggy suggested Kirsten McDuffie take his place in the office. Kirsten left the D.A.’s office after they didn’t take her Daredevil warnings with respect, and she bulldozed her way into Matt’s space. Matt was grateful for the assistance, but still very conscious of their past feelings for each other. They watched the conclusion of the Bainwood trial together, as a rich white woman was found Not Guilty after shooting a black teenager dead when she spotted him in her building. The African-American D.A. 
James Priest gave a televised speech outside the courthouse after the verdict. On the air, he suddenly displayed the full names and home addresses of all twelve jurors, calling upon the public to seek them out and show the jurors what real justice looks like! Only Matt’s enhanced senses detected a shift in the broadcast and the end of the speech was performed by a vocal imitator, not D.A. Priest himself.
Daredevil swung into action to stop the race riot erupting around the city. He quickly recognized not only the Sons of the Serpents’ involvement in the false broadcast, but also the signs of one of the Jester’s old schemes for media manipulation. Daredevil reached the courthouse and made sure D.A. Priest and the jurors were safe before following a lead the Jester left for him. The thoughtful thespian outsmarted himself, though, for Jester believed the theory that Matt Murdock 
merely faked his blindness to cover for Daredevil’s identity. As a result, the visually well-designed prop of Foggy Nelson committing suicide the Jester set up in his townhouse failed utterly. Matt’s senses barely recognized the foam and latex figure was meant to be human, much less a likeness to Foggy. [Daredevil (3rd series) #30-31]
Jester continued his media campaign of agitating the population, such as a broadcast from Major J. Jonah Jameson rescinding all local handgun regulation. Matt and Foggy looked into the Serpents’ origins and found a Son and sorcerer named Lucian Sinclair had drawn power from the fabled Darkhold. Daredevil flew out to Stonehills, Kentucky and worked with the Legion of Monsters to reclaim Sinclair’s cursed pages of that book. To defeat the Serpents, Matt was completely open with Kirsten about being Daredevil and asked for her help. They used Nate Hackett’s transceiver tech to broadcast their own signal counter to Jester’s. They threatened to destroy the Darkhold pages if the Serpents didn’t turn Jester over to the authorities. Daredevil 
went to the rendezvous to claim Jester, knowing it would be a trap by Sinclair and the Serpents. Meanwhile, Kirsten went off-book and kept broadcasting, denouncing the Serpents and their message for all of New York to hear. Jester and many of the Serpents were apprehended, and Matt and Kirsten grew closer over their successful risk and newfound honesty. [Daredevil (3rd series) #32-34]
Matt’s actions had repercussions. Two high-ranking Serpents, Ogilvy and Derrin, confronted him at Foggy’s bedside. Ogilvy’s son Donald was a loyal Serpent implicated in an arson performed by the Sons but, technically, Donald had no involvement. In return for Murdock’s defense of Donald Ogilvy, they would “forget” the massive collection of evidence the Sons had assembled which proved Matt Murdock was Daredevil. This included a tactical breakdown of his powers and weaknesses to be sold to his enemies, as well as proof of his identity, the perjury and false claims 
he made to win the lawsuit against the Daily Globe, and even the criminal actions taken by Vanessa Fisk on his behalf. Faced with the threat of blackmail or defending a man in court who was innocent in only the most technical of senses, Matt made a fateful decision. He and Kirsten appeared in court as representation for Ogilvy, and Kirsten called Matt to the stand. Under oath and acknowledging the penalties of perjury, Matt Murdock admitted in open court that he was the crime-fighter known as Daredevil. [Daredevil (3rd series) #35]
Having discussed the plan with Foggy and Kirsten, Matt was prepared to change the trajectory of his life in order to deny the Serpents their blackmail. He detailed the events after that fateful truck accident, his enhanced senses compensating for his blindness, his own morally and ethically wrong actions in suing the Daily Globe, etc. The courtroom scene fell into chaos as it was revealed that the judge was another high-ranking Serpent who framed Ogilvy’s son in a power grab, but bringing down the Sons of the Serpent was almost an afterthought by this point.
What happened next was what truly mattered. Before a board of inquiry from the New York State Bar, Matt Murdock answered for his malpractice and unethical transgressions performed over the 
course of his law career in the name of preserving his secret identity. This included not only his countersuit and perjury relating to the Daily Globe, but also his misrepresentations in the Samuel Griggs case, and various acts of witness tampering, Brady violations, failures to disclose, and so on. The board had no choice but to order the disbarment of Matt Murdock and Franklin Nelson from license to practice law in New York State. Seeking a fresh start, Matt, Kirsten and Foggy came up with a plan together. The most likely state to grant a disbarred lawyer a new license is one where they had practiced before. Matt and Kirsten decided to sit for the California bar and renew his old ties to the city of San Francisco. With no more secrets between them, they also rekindled their personal relationship. [Daredevil (3rd series) #36]
Matt and Kirsten’s reconciliation had some unexpected consequences. The decision to expose his identity came after Daredevil consulted with Elektra about what to do. She was the one who counseled him to find a third option to escape the Serpents’ trap. [Daredevil (3rd series) #35] After his disbarment and the decision to move out west, Matt approached Elektra about joining them. For the first time in years, however, Elektra showed a moment of vulnerability and asked Matt if he still loved her. He admitted that he did, but no longer in the way they once shared. This opportunity for a reunion passed him by, and Daredevil and Elektra would not be reuniting anytime soon. [Elektra (4th series) #9]