Trinity Barrister James Kemp was successful in representing the adult Applicant in their claim for a declaration of parentage relating to removal of the man registered on his birth certificate and replacement with the proposed biological father.
The evidence presented to the Court consisted of predominately DNA evidence, although no direct testing had been done with the ‘new’ father due to his passing.
Not only had such testing proved that the birth certificate father was not biologically related to the Applicant but there had been testing on samples of the Y Haplogroup chromosome which is passed down largely untouched (bar the odd mutation) from father to son and only down the patrilineal line. This showed no connection to the man on the birth certificate but corresponded to the proposed new father.
There was further DNA evidence from autosomal testing which had been placed on online on DNA web pages, for others to connect to and which after some research and other DNA matches via these sites demonstrated that the birth certificate birth had no link to the Applicant but that the proposed biological father had such a connection both to the Applicant, his children and others sharing the same surname and lineage to that of the proposed father.
James represented the successful Appellant in the Court of Appeal case of Spencer v Anderson [2018] EWCA Civ 100 in which the High Court’s judgment to engage the inherent jurisdiction of the Court to test a postmortem DNA sample to discover paternity was upheld.