How do judges of the Supreme Court of Florida reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Supreme Court of Florida / Joined 1994 / Served to 2009

Charles T. Wells

Justice, Supreme Court of Florida

Charles T. Wells was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida, who joined the court in 1994. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1939 · age 87
Tenure: 1994–2009 · 15 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1994	Supreme Court of Florida	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Wells authored 205 published opinions for the court (1994–2009), plus 46 dissents and 27 concurrences. Most cited: Maddox v. State (262 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. 128 of these were attributed to Wells 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
2000	Maddox v. State· Concurrence†	760 So. 2d 89	262
2002	Reed v. State	837 So. 2d 366	206
2004	Nelson v. State	875 So. 2d 579	169
2009	Wallace v. Dean· Dissent†	3 So. 3d 1035	168
1995	Globe Newspaper Co. v. King	658 So. 2d 518	137
2002	Puryear v. State	810 So. 2d 901	124
2003	Willis Shaw Express, Inc. v. Hilyer Sod, Inc.	849 So. 2d 276	122
2004	Berges v. Infinity Ins. Co.· Dissent†	896 So. 2d 665	119
1997	Hadden v. State	690 So. 2d 573	113
2009	Larimore v. State· Dissent†	2 So. 3d 101	109
2005	Raymond James Financial v. Saldukas	896 So. 2d 707	109
2004	Higgins v. State Farm Fire and Cas. Co.	894 So. 2d 5	99
2000	R.F. v. Florida Department of Children & Families· Concurrence†	770 So. 2d 1189	95
2000	Vest v. Travelers Ins. Co.	753 So. 2d 1270	94
1999	Amendments to Florida Rules of Criminal Procedure 3.111(e) & 3.800· Concurrence†	761 So. 2d 1015	84

Showing the 15 most-cited of 278 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 Supreme Court of Florida reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Charles T. Wells on?: Charles T. Wells was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida.

Sources

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

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