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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Mississippi / Joined 2009 / Former Justice

James W. Kitchens

Justice, Supreme Court of Mississippi

James W. Kitchens was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi (7 judges, selected by nonpartisan election), who joined the court in 2009. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1943 · age 83
Tenure: 2009 · 17 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2009	Supreme Court of Mississippi	–	–

Education

University of Southern Mississippi

Judicial Record

In our data, Kitchens authored 190 published opinions for the court (2009–2024), plus 167 dissents and 98 concurrences. Most cited: Rowland v. State (327 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. 427 of these were attributed to Kitchens 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
2010	Rowland v. State· Concurrence†	42 So. 3d 503	327
2013	Karpinsky v. American National Insurance Co.· Dissent†	109 So. 3d 84	222
2009	Goff v. State· Dissent†	14 So. 3d 625	189
2013	Batiste v. State· Dissent†	121 So. 3d 808	151
2010	Gillett v. State· Dissent†	56 So. 3d 469	115
2009	Neal v. State· Concurrence†	15 So. 3d 388	104
2014	Keller v. State· Dissent†	138 So. 3d 817	89
2015	Ronk v. State· Concurrence†	172 So. 3d 1112	83
2014	Conner v. State· Concurrence†	138 So. 3d 143	80
2013	Jones v. State· Dissent†	122 So. 3d 698	75
2010	Gore v. State· Dissent†	37 So. 3d 1178	71
2010	Fulgham v. State· Concurrence†	46 So. 3d 315	70
2017	Timothy Nelson Evans v. State of Mississippi· Dissent†	226 So. 3d 1	69
2010	Mladineo v. Schmidt· Dissent†	52 So. 3d 1154	68
2009	Vaughn v. Mississippi Baptist Medical Center· Concurrence†	20 So. 3d 645	68

Showing the 15 most-cited of 455 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 Mississippi reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was James W. Kitchens on?: James W. Kitchens was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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