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 1972 / Served to 1983

John P. Decarlo

Judge, Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals

John P. Decarlo was a Judge of the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, who joined the court in 1972. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1972–1983 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1972	Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Decarlo authored 325 published opinions for the court (1972–1983), plus 25 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Watson v. State (153 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. 140 of these were attributed to Decarlo 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	Watson v. State	392 So. 2d 1274	153
1981	Slaughter v. State	411 So. 2d 819	71
1979	Williams v. State	375 So. 2d 1257	70
1977	McLaren v. State	353 So. 2d 24	63
1983	Hopkins v. State	429 So. 2d 1146	61
1981	Crumpton v. State	402 So. 2d 1081	56
1981	Myers v. State	401 So. 2d 288	55
1981	Holley v. State	397 So. 2d 211	51
1974	Ex Parte White	300 So. 2d 420	48
1979	Allen v. State	380 So. 2d 313	45
1982	Raines v. State	429 So. 2d 1104	44
1981	Congo v. State	409 So. 2d 475	44
1981	Stewart v. State	398 So. 2d 369	44
1975	McDonald v. State	329 So. 2d 583	44
1975	Zuck v. State	325 So. 2d 531	43

Showing the 15 most-cited of 352 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 P. Decarlo on?: John P. Decarlo 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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10 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).