The highlighted portion is not correct. I have stated precisely that: You don't see a connection between the 1) right to counsel and 2) the right to remain silent.
The bolded portion is your assertion. "Consequential link" between those right are denied by you, and that is to say the least subject to debate. Whether the court made findings re free will, "decision", or other is what is inconsequential and is irrelavent to this discussion.
The right to an attorney has meaning and I would ask you to pretend for a moment that you are an attorney, an attorney assigned to defend AK in this matter. What would your argument be? Please tell me what service you would have provided your client if you were actually there to advise her before any statements were made? Would you sit quietly as statements - "confused and the best memory that I can recall" - were being made? Which include even vague acusations against another? What kind of attorney would allow that? Would such an attorney stop offering advice because, er, oh those statements are construed as a separate crime under pertinent law?
I know that you want to characterize her calunnia as an act independent of any relationship to the right to counsel, but that is frankly ludicrous. You can keep talking about the adjudication of the calunnia as involving "decision" on AK's part. That is wholly irrelevant to her lack of counsel and the effect it had on her ability to make such decision. I would argue that the presence of an attorney is for this very purpose. And further, the legal machinations of arguing free will and decision etc wouldn't last a minute before a reviewing tribunal. And that is what weare talking about here.
You would be better off going back to your arguments (I believe you argued this) that AK was not entitled to an attorney because she was supposedy only "strongly suspected" at that point and not yet entitled to an attorney. And back to the screaming in the interrogation room etc, which makes that great challenge to say the least.
You see, we are not going to agree. It seems to me your objection is on evidentiary level. What you object to, is the existence, or the admissibility, of a field of judgement in the merits where the judges can investigate find out if - factually - a behaviour was the consequence of a decision, which makes the person criminally responsible for it.
It seems that what you and Numbers maintain, is that instead this field doesn't exist, and you call these findings "legal machinations". In other words, your theory is that having the status of an informant who is testifying without being assisted by a lawyer, itself creates a "black box" that protects the person from whatever consequence the person does or says, a kind of bubble that legally isolates that situation from the rest of reality and makes so that any event from inside that "black box" will not have legal effects for the person under custody. (By the way, we are not even talking about "suspect", formal or informal, since Knox was not a suspect of this charge of calunnia that had not been committed; so we are talking about just any informant who talks without being assisted by a lawyer).
Now, such legal theory is in fact what you propose. My objection is that such theory is obviously absurd. As an example that may challenge your theory - as something that would "pop" the bubble like a pin - I cite the case of Luciano Aviello: a person under custody, who talks with a prosecutor without being assisted by a lawyer, and is charged of calunnia as a consequence of this. My question would be: do you think he should be immune from this charge on principle?
This is the paradoxical effect of your theory. Because this is the problem. You create parts of realities that are not just offering some protection to the suspect but are factually "black boxes"; the informant (or suspect) in your theory gains an absolute privilege with respect to any legal consequence of his/her action, not just simple protection from self-incrimination.
Your argument about a previous counsel with a lawyer: it's not an argument in my opinion, because it is rather obvious that not talking with a lawyer before it deprives the defendant from a possible advice, thus diminishes defense rights against self incrimination. But the defence rights against self incrimination are designed to protect, and are legitimate insofar as they protect the suspect (or person under custody)
only from self incriminating statements. They are not supposed to protect the defendant from just
all possible legal consequence of his/her words and actions.
If the defence attorney before an interrogation suggests to his client to not speak at all, and the suspect follows suggestion, then the person (Knox in this case) would be probably also protected from
all consequences that may derive
in rerum natura from saying any possible thing withint that situation. A suspect who is given this previous opportunity of chosing a more "radical shield" could be maybe luckier than Knox, because whouldn't find himself/herself in a situation in which he/she may decide to commit a calunnia; but a person does not have a
right to have this kind of total protection, not just from the effect of self-incriminating statements but from everything even from the temptation of committing crimes or from the effect of it. This protection would go
beyond the simple protection from self-incriminating awarded to a suspect. One thing is saying that Knox would have been safer if she she enjoyed this situation, another thing is to affirm that this protection is a right of the citizen. It is not. The ECHR principle is not an insurance that provides this kind of shield coverage.
