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

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

Supreme Court of Missouri / Joined 2011 / Active

George W. Draper III

Justice, Supreme Court of Missouri

George W. Draper III is a Justice of the Supreme Court of Missouri, serving since 2011. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1953 · age 73
Tenure: Since 2011 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2011	Supreme Court of Missouri	–	–

Education

Morehouse College

Judicial Record

In our data, Draper authored 49 published opinions for the court (2012–2021). Most cited: Lance C. Shockley v. State of Missouri (106 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. 1 of these was attributed to Draper 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
2019	Lance C. Shockley v. State of Missouri	579 S.W.3d 881	106
2016	Richard D. Davis v. State of Missouri	486 S.W.3d 898	98
2014	John Templemire v. W&M Welding, Inc.	433 S.W.3d 371	73
2016	State of Missouri v. Luis Zetina-Torres	482 S.W.3d 801	70
2014	Louis Edward Mallow v. State of Missouri	439 S.W.3d 764	69
2012	State v. Tisius	362 S.W.3d 398	65
2016	State of Missouri v. Chadwick Leland Walter	479 S.W.3d 118	62
2015	State of Missouri v. Thomas A. Ess	453 S.W.3d 196	61
2015	State of Missouri v. Jesse Driskill	459 S.W.3d 412	55
2012	STATE EX REL. VALENTINE v. Orr	366 S.W.3d 534	50
2019	Harold Lampley and Rene Frost v. The Missouri Commission on Human Rights and Alisa Warren	570 S.W.3d 16	45
2012	State Ex Inf. Hensley v. Young	362 S.W.3d 386	39
2019	Leslie Seaton v. Shelter Mutual Insurance Company	574 S.W.3d 245	32
2014	State of Missouri v. Christopher L. Collings	450 S.W.3d 741	32
2012	Fannie Mae v. My Quang Truong	361 S.W.3d 400	30

Showing the 15 most-cited of 49 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 Missouri reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court is George W. Draper III on?: George W. Draper III is a Justice of the Supreme Court of Missouri.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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