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 1978 / Served to 1983

Carl E.F. Dally

Judge, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

Carl E.F. Dally was a Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, who joined the court in 1978. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1924 · age 102
Tenure: 1978–1983 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1978	Texas Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Education

University of Denver

Judicial Record

In our data, Dally authored 295 published opinions for the court (1971–1983), plus 36 dissents and 21 concurrences. Most cited: Royster v. State (763 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. 278 of these were attributed to Dally 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
1981	Royster v. State†	622 S.W.2d 442	763
1980	Sanchez v. State†	603 S.W.2d 869	466
1978	Garcia v. State	563 S.W.2d 925	437
1982	Dues v. State†	634 S.W.2d 304	373
1980	Quinones v. State	592 S.W.2d 933	312
1982	Ex Parte McWilliams· Separate†	634 S.W.2d 815	259
1983	Phillips v. State· Dissent†	650 S.W.2d 396	257
1982	Aliff v. State†	627 S.W.2d 166	255
1979	Carrillo v. State†	591 S.W.2d 876	254
1978	Moon v. State†	572 S.W.2d 681	180
1981	Torres v. State†	614 S.W.2d 436	178
1980	Benavides v. State†	600 S.W.2d 809	169
1978	Bodde v. State	568 S.W.2d 344	168
1979	Bates v. State· Separate†	587 S.W.2d 121	164
1978	Pitts v. State	569 S.W.2d 898	163

Showing the 15 most-cited of 373 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 Carl E.F. Dally on?: Carl E.F. Dally 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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5 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).