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

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

Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals / Joined 1989 / Active

Gary Leonard Lumpkin

Presiding Judge, Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals

Gary Leonard Lumpkin is a Presiding Judge of the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, serving since 1989. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1946 · age 80
Tenure: Since 1989 · 37 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1989	Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Education

Georgia Southwestern State University

Judicial Record

In our data, Lumpkin authored 311 published opinions for the court (1989–2019), plus 52 dissents and 319 concurrences. Most cited: Simpson v. State (378 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. 493 of these were attributed to Lumpkin 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
1994	Simpson v. State	876 P.2d 690	378
1989	Fox v. State· Concurrence†	779 P.2d 562	211
1993	Romano v. State	847 P.2d 368	200
1994	Mayes v. State	887 P.2d 1288	194
1995	Cargle v. State	909 P.2d 806	189
1997	Walker v. State· Concurrence†	933 P.2d 327	172
1993	Pickens v. State	850 P.2d 328	162
1995	Romano v. State· Concurrence†	909 P.2d 92	159
2000	Bland v. State	2000 OK CR 11	158
2012	NELOMS v. State· Concurrence†	2012 OK CR 7	157
1993	Woodruff v. State	846 P.2d 1124	146
1997	Hung Thanh Le v. State· Concurrence†	947 P.2d 535	137
1993	Paxton v. State	867 P.2d 1309	137
1991	Williamson v. State	812 P.2d 384	134
1995	Valdez v. State· Concurrence†	900 P.2d 363	129

Showing the 15 most-cited of 682 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 Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court is Gary Leonard Lumpkin on?: Gary Leonard Lumpkin is a Presiding Judge of the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals.

Sources

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

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