How do judges of the Missouri Court of Appeals reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Missouri Court of Appeals / Joined 2009 / Active

Karen King Mitchell

Judge, Missouri Court of Appeals

Karen King Mitchell is a Judge of the Missouri Court of Appeals, serving since 2009. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2009 · 17 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2009	Missouri Court of Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Mitchell authored 374 published opinions for the court (2009–2025), plus 1 dissent and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Howard v. Turnbull (78 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. 185 of these were attributed to Mitchell 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
2010	Howard v. Turnbull†	316 S.W.3d 431	78
2013	Wilson v. Image Flooring, LLC†	400 S.W.3d 386	38
2015	Delise diaz v. Autozoners, LLC, D/B/A Autozone	484 S.W.3d 64	31
2010	City of Greenwood v. Martin Marietta Materials, Inc.†	311 S.W.3d 258	26
2016	State of Missouri v. Gabriel L. Leonard	490 S.W.3d 730	25
2012	Borges v. Missouri Public Entity Risk Management Fund†	358 S.W.3d 177	25
2013	Sparks v. Sparks†	417 S.W.3d 269	24
2009	State v. Smothers†	297 S.W.3d 626	23
2017	Kerr v. Missouri Veterans Commission†	537 S.W.3d 865	22
2013	Clayton v. Sarratt†	387 S.W.3d 439	21
2012	Golden Rule Insurance Co. v. R.S.†	368 S.W.3d 327	21
2010	Noble v. Shawnee Gun Shop, Inc.†	316 S.W.3d 364	21
2009	Bennartz v. City of Columbia†	300 S.W.3d 251	21
2016	Kenneth Ferguson v. Curators of Lincoln University, In Their Official Capacities, a/k/a Lincoln University†	498 S.W.3d 481	20
2015	L. Dotson v. Dillard's, Inc.	472 S.W.3d 599	20

Showing the 15 most-cited of 377 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 Missouri Court of Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court is Karen King Mitchell on?: Karen King Mitchell is a Judge of the Missouri Court of Appeals.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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17 years on the Missouri Court of Appeals. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).