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

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Court of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee / Joined 1997 / Active

James Curwood Witt Jr.

Judge, Court of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee

James Curwood Witt Jr. is a Judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee, serving since 1997. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 1997 · 29 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1997	Court of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee	–	–

Education

William Jewell College

Judicial Record

In our data, Witt authored 1,522 published opinions for the court (1993–2024), plus 2 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Pendergrass (1,047 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. 7 of these were attributed to Witt 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
1999	State v. Pendergrass	13 S.W.3d 389	1,047
1998	Hicks v. State	983 S.W.2d 240	927
2003	State v. Winters	137 S.W.3d 641	387
1998	State v. Electroplating, Inc.	990 S.W.2d 211	362
2004	Cauthern v. State	145 S.W.3d 571	266
2000	State v. Lewis	36 S.W.3d 88	231
2008	State v. Gilley	297 S.W.3d 739	221
1999	State v. Nunley	22 S.W.3d 282	179
2000	State v. Thompson	36 S.W.3d 102	166
2007	State v. Schiefelbein	230 S.W.3d 88	161
2007	State v. Reams	265 S.W.3d 423	157
2007	State v. Gann	251 S.W.3d 446	122
2011	Gdongalay P. Berry v. State of Tennessee	366 S.W.3d 160	104
2009	Tucker v. Morrow	335 S.W.3d 116	98
1999	State v. Russell	10 S.W.3d 270	91

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,524 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 Court of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court is James Curwood Witt Jr. on?: James Curwood Witt Jr. is a Judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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