How do judges of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Texas Court of Criminal Appeals / Joined 1985 / Served to 1997

Bill Marvin White

Judge, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

Bill Marvin White was a Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, who joined the court in 1985. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1932 · age 94
Tenure: 1985–1997 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1985	Texas Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, White authored 172 published opinions for the court (1892–1997), plus 20 dissents and 8 concurrences. Most cited: Clewis v. State (5,788 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 48 of these were attributed to White by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
1996	Clewis v. State· Dissent†	922 S.W.2d 126	5,788
1986	Sharp v. State	707 S.W.2d 611	1,862
1988	Moreno v. State	755 S.W.2d 866	1,851
1991	Chambers v. State	805 S.W.2d 459	1,350
1993	Johnson v. State	871 S.W.2d 183	1,078
1996	Rachal v. State	917 S.W.2d 799	768
1989	Butler v. State· Concurrence†	769 S.W.2d 234	713
1993	Turro v. State	867 S.W.2d 43	642
1991	Allridge v. State	850 S.W.2d 471	612
1990	Villalon v. State	791 S.W.2d 130	542
1991	Mayes v. State	816 S.W.2d 79	528
1995	Johnson v. State	912 S.W.2d 227	525
1994	Bigby v. State· Concurrence†	892 S.W.2d 864	509
1993	Camacho v. State	864 S.W.2d 524	440
1994	Burks v. State	876 S.W.2d 877	436

Showing the 15 most-cited of 204 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Bill Marvin White on?: Bill Marvin White was a Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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12 years on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).