Mr. David French:

The family law court would always deal with it within a certain period of time following the guilty verdict. The family law court would have discretion. The edge case that is called out is a woman who kills in self-defence, gets a manslaughter verdict and is guilty of killing. In that situation, the court should have discretion to say suspending her guardianship is not necessarily going to help. The criminal courts had to give her a manslaughter conviction. Taking her guardianship off her is not going help. There needs to be discretion for the court in this regard, as far as I can see. There are cases like that. Thankfully, they are rare but they happen. It is not a mechanical process whereby a guilty verdict is landed and, therefore, guardianship gets removed from that person. There needs to be an element of court discretion but, in the vast majority of cases, guardianship should be taken away. My separate concern is how the monitoring of this would happen because the family law courts are in camera. We could all go away thinking there was a Valerie's Law and nothing actually changes out in the real world.

Regarding suspension versus removal, pragmatically, it makes no odds. The main thing is you have it or you do not have it. Whether it is suspended or removed makes no difference; the person does not have it. The other thing to remember is that children are under guardianship until they are 18, typically. If it is suspended for 17 or 18 years, it may as well have been removed because it is not something you have forever. You lose it when the child hits 18. Pragmatically, why not just suspend? Maybe something will change and it will get unsuspended. Maybe an appeal works and the person gets their guardianship unsuspended on application. It needs to be approached pragmatically.