Grandparent Visitation Statute Applies Even If Other GPs Adopted Child

Tennessee grandparent visitation case summary.

Marvin Seibers, et al., v. Carol Latimer

At the time of the 2016 filing of this Campbell County, Tennessee, case, the two children (born in 2009 and 2012) were in the custody of their paternal grandmother.  The children had previously been removed from the care of their biological mother due to substance abuse issues.  The children had suffered significant health issues, but were improving while in the grandmother’s custody.  While this case was pending, the paternal grandfather adopted the children.

The maternal grandparents filed this petition to request grandparent visitation.  They stated that they had a previous relationship with the children, but the paternal grandmother had limited their interaction.  The maternal grandparents denied these allegations, and also alleged that the maternal grandmother wasn’t really the biological grandmother.

After hearing the evidence, the trial court granted the petition and ordered supervised visitation, which would transition to unsupervised visitation the following year.  In so doing, the trial court applied the Tennessee grandparent visitation statute, and held that this action was in the children’s best interest.  Concerned with this outcome, the paternal grandmother appealed to the Tennessee Court of Appeals.  She argued that the grandparent visitation statute didn’t apply to a case where the children had been removed from the custody of the biological parent and were now in the custody of the other grandparents.

After discussing the standard of review, the appeals court turned to the language of the statute.  The paternal grandmother argued that the language did not apply because the children were already in her care as legal custodian at the time of the petition.  Since she was an adoptive parent at the time of the actual hearing, she argued that this portion of the statute cut off the rights of the other set of grandparents.

The appeals court pointed out that the case boiled down to statutory construction, and the court’s role was to ascertain and give effect to the intent of the legislature.

Upon reading the statute, the court concluded that it cuts off the rights of grandparents only when the child is adopted by someone outside the family.  It even noted that the statute implied that some cases of adoption would still allow the statute to apply.

For these reasons, the Court of Appeals held that the grandparent visitation statute did apply to the case.  Since there was no error in how the lower court had applied the statute, the Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s ruling.

No. E2017-01285-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. May 25, 2018).

See original opinion for exact language.  Legal citations omitted.

To learn more, see Grandparent Visitation Rights Law in Tennessee.

See also Tennessee Parenting Plans and Child Support Worksheets: Building a Constructive Future for Your Family featuring examples of parenting plans and child support worksheets from real cases available on Amazon.com.