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 1967 / Served to 1970

Ernest Walter Belcher

Judge, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

Ernest Walter Belcher was a Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, who joined the court in 1967. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1901–1976
Tenure: 1967–1970 · 3 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1967	Texas Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Education

Tarleton State University

Judicial Record

In our data, Belcher authored 307 published opinions for the court (1953–1970), plus 1 dissent and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Edwards v. State (214 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. 152 of these were attributed to Belcher 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
1968	Edwards v. State· Separate†	427 S.W.2d 629	214
1967	Hullum v. State· Separate†	415 S.W.2d 192	166
1968	Vessels v. State	432 S.W.2d 108	99
1967	Hoskins v. State	425 S.W.2d 825	87
1969	Spann v. State	448 S.W.2d 128	73
1968	Ward v. State· Separate†	427 S.W.2d 876	51
1968	Schepps v. State· Concurrence†	432 S.W.2d 926	49
1967	Hafti v. State	416 S.W.2d 824	49
1969	Branch v. State· Separate†	445 S.W.2d 756	47
1967	O'NEAL v. State	421 S.W.2d 391	39
1967	Sutton v. State	419 S.W.2d 857	38
1970	Beshears v. State· Dissent†	461 S.W.2d 122	37
1970	Huffman v. State	450 S.W.2d 858	36
1958	McBee v. State	316 S.W.2d 748	36
1969	Thompson v. State	447 S.W.2d 920	34

Showing the 15 most-cited of 323 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 Ernest Walter Belcher on?: Ernest Walter Belcher 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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3 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).