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 1937 / Served to 1955

Harry Newton Graves

Judge, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

Harry Newton Graves was a Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (9 judges, selected by partisan election), who joined the court in 1937. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1877 · age 149
Tenure: 1937–1955 · 18 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1937	Texas Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Graves authored 1,531 published opinions for the court (1937–1954), plus 36 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Wolfe v. State (97 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. 1,090 of these were attributed to Graves 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
1944	Wolfe v. State· Separate	178 S.W.2d 274	97
1954	Gilderbloom v. State· Separate†	272 S.W.2d 106	83
1951	Johns v. State	236 S.W.2d 820	78
1948	Ross v. State· Separate†	153 Tex. Crim. 312	69
1944	Crowell v. State· Separate	180 S.W.2d 343	67
1949	State v. Klein· Separate†	154 Tex. Crim. 31	61
1938	Otts v. State	116 S.W.2d 1084	51
1943	Beard v. State†	146 Tex. Crim. 96	50
1948	Ex Parte Hayden	215 S.W.2d 620	48
1951	Cox v. State· Dissent†	157 Tex. Crim. 134	46
1950	McKay v. State· Separate†	155 Tex. Crim. 416	45
1947	Kennedy v. State· Separate†	150 Tex. Crim. 215	44
1946	Darty v. State· Separate	193 S.W.2d 195	43
1943	Wallace v. State†	145 Tex. Crim. 625	41
1947	Dearing v. State· Separate†	151 Tex. Crim. 6	40

Showing the 15 most-cited of 2,094 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 Harry Newton Graves on?: Harry Newton Graves was a Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

Sources

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

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18 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).