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 1984 / Served to 1997

John Malcolm Patterson

Judge, Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals

John Malcolm Patterson was a Judge of the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, who joined the court in 1984. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1921 · age 105
Tenure: 1984–1997 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1984	Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Education

The University of Alabama
The University of Alabama

Judicial Record

In our data, Patterson authored 878 published opinions for the court (1930–2005), plus 6 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Williams v. State (201 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. 415 of these were attributed to Patterson 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
1996	Williams v. State	710 So. 2d 1276	201
1996	Bush v. State	695 So. 2d 70	196
1992	Coral v. State	628 So. 2d 954	196
1991	Haney v. State	603 So. 2d 368	188
1985	Magwood v. State	494 So. 2d 124	179
1990	Ward v. State	557 So. 2d 848	176
1988	Hallford v. State	548 So. 2d 526	151
1985	Jackson v. State	516 So. 2d 726	145
1996	Smith v. State	698 So. 2d 189	144
1999	Ingram v. State	779 So. 2d 1225	124
1990	Newsome v. State	570 So. 2d 703	123
1993	Zumbado v. State	615 So. 2d 1223	122
1991	McMillian v. State	594 So. 2d 1253	117
1987	Nicks v. State	521 So. 2d 1018	113
1988	Bui v. State	551 So. 2d 1094	109

Showing the 15 most-cited of 887 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 Malcolm Patterson on?: John Malcolm Patterson 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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13 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).