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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals / Joined 1999 / Served to 2001

James H. Fry

Judge, Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals

James H. Fry was a Judge of the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, who joined the court in 1999. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1950 · age 76
Tenure: 1999–2001 · 2 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1999	Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Education

Athens State University
Samford University

Judicial Record

In our data, Fry authored 84 published opinions for the court (1999–2003), plus 6 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: Broadnax v. State (114 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. 41 of these were attributed to Fry 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	Broadnax v. State	825 So. 2d 134	114
2000	Johnson v. State	820 So. 2d 842	86
2000	Simmons v. State	797 So. 2d 1134	85
2003	Clark v. State	896 So. 2d 584	68
2000	Law v. State	778 So. 2d 249	58
2000	Dobyne v. State	805 So. 2d 733	57
2000	Ward v. State	814 So. 2d 899	54
1999	Minor v. State	780 So. 2d 707	54
1999	Jones v. State	753 So. 2d 1174	50
1999	Powell v. State	796 So. 2d 404	49
1999	Norris v. State· Concurrence†	793 So. 2d 847	47
2000	Waldrop v. State	859 So. 2d 1138	41
2000	Griffin v. State	790 So. 2d 267	40
1999	Nicks v. State	783 So. 2d 895	39
2000	Hunter v. State	802 So. 2d 265	33

Showing the 15 most-cited of 94 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 Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was James H. Fry on?: James H. Fry was a Judge of the Alabama 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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2 years on the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).