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 1995 / Served to 2014

Jerry L. Smith

Judge, Court of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee

Jerry L. Smith was a Judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee, who joined the court in 1995. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1995–2014 · 18 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1995	Court of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Smith authored 1,000 published opinions for the court (1993–2025), plus 1 dissent and 2 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Baker (193 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. 10 of these were attributed to Smith 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
1997	State v. Baker	966 S.W.2d 429	193
2006	Granderson v. State	197 S.W.3d 782	153
1998	State v. Davenport	980 S.W.2d 407	146
2001	State v. Inlow	52 S.W.3d 101	141
2005	State v. Kendrick	178 S.W.3d 734	114
1997	State v. Grissom	956 S.W.2d 514	86
2004	Freshwater v. State	160 S.W.3d 548	82
2000	State v. Dooley	29 S.W.3d 542	75
1997	State v. Leggs	955 S.W.2d 845	75
2000	State v. Shropshire	45 S.W.3d 64	70
1999	State v. Ashworth	3 S.W.3d 25	61
2009	State v. Brock	327 S.W.3d 645	53
2008	State v. Nelson	275 S.W.3d 851	52
2001	State v. Halake	102 S.W.3d 661	47
1998	State v. Hodge	989 S.W.2d 717	47

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,003 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 was Jerry L. Smith on?: Jerry L. Smith was 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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18 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).