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 1991

John C. Tyson III

Judge, Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals

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

Lived: 1926–2012
Tenure: 1972–1991 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

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

Education

The University of Alabama
The University of Alabama

Judicial Record

In our data, Tyson authored 1,529 published opinions for the court (1901–1992), plus 6 dissents and 16 concurrences. Most cited: Dill v. State (180 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. 730 of these were attributed to Tyson 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
1991	Dill v. State	600 So. 2d 343	180
1987	Hooks v. State	534 So. 2d 329	174
1988	Holladay v. State	549 So. 2d 122	139
1981	Allen v. State	414 So. 2d 989	121
1982	Harris v. State	420 So. 2d 812	88
1991	Thompson v. State	581 So. 2d 1216	86
1983	Nelson v. State	440 So. 2d 1130	85
1980	Carpenter v. State	404 So. 2d 89	85
1980	Brown v. State	392 So. 2d 1248	84
1986	Thompson v. State	503 So. 2d 871	77
1982	Bush v. State	431 So. 2d 555	77
1988	Thomas v. State	539 So. 2d 375	76
1974	Barnett v. State	291 So. 2d 353	76
1972	Thigpen v. State	270 So. 2d 666	71
1989	Jackson v. State	549 So. 2d 616	70

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,553 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 C. Tyson III on?: John C. Tyson III 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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19 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).