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 1975 / Served to 1982

John Garber Bookout

Judge, Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals

John Garber Bookout was a Judge of the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, who joined the court in 1975. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1935 · age 91
Tenure: 1975–1982 · 7 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1975	Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Education

The University of Alabama

Judicial Record

In our data, Bookout authored 332 published opinions for the court (1975–1982), plus 18 dissents and 16 concurrences. Most cited: Gunn v. State (106 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. 150 of these were attributed to Bookout 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
1980	Gunn v. State	387 So. 2d 280	106
1980	Bufford v. State	382 So. 2d 1162	93
1980	Tice v. State	386 So. 2d 1180	80
1977	Slinker v. State	344 So. 2d 1264	66
1976	Johnson v. State	335 So. 2d 663	66
1981	McCallum v. State	407 So. 2d 865	65
1979	Williams v. State	377 So. 2d 634	55
1976	Morton v. State	338 So. 2d 423	55
1976	Bell v. State	339 So. 2d 96	54
1981	Craig v. State	410 So. 2d 449	51
1978	Waters v. State	360 So. 2d 358	50
1977	Hill v. State	350 So. 2d 716	49
1981	Thomas v. State	393 So. 2d 504	46
1981	Carpenter v. State	400 So. 2d 417	45
1975	McDonald v. State· Dissent†	329 So. 2d 583	44

Showing the 15 most-cited of 366 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 John Garber Bookout on?: John Garber Bookout 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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7 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).