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

The court's current selection method is legislative election.

Court of Appeals of Virginia / Joined 2013 / Active

Maria Graff Decker

Judge, Court of Appeals of Virginia

Maria Graff Decker is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Virginia, serving since 2013. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2013 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2013	Court of Appeals of Virginia	–	–

Education

University of Richmond

Judicial Record

In our data, Decker authored 26 published opinions for the court (2014–2019). Most cited: Alfred Banks, Jr. v. Commonwealth of Virginia (351 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. 26 of these were attributed to Decker 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
2017	Alfred Banks, Jr. v. Commonwealth of Virginia†	67 Va. App. 273	351
2015	Tiffany Stevens Miller v. Commonwealth of Virginia†	64 Va. App. 527	162
2017	Najee Finique Hairston v. Commonwealth of Virginia†	67 Va. App. 552	81
2015	Bruce Edison Parham v. Commonwealth of Virginia†	64 Va. App. 560	63
2016	Shawanda S. Thorne v. Commonwealth of Virginia†	66 Va. App. 248	62
2017	Abdul Lateef Salahuddin v. Commonwealth of Virginia†	67 Va. App. 190	60
2016	Patrick Franklin Graves, Jr. v. Commonwealth of Virginia†	65 Va. App. 702	59
2014	Commonwealth of Virginia v. Rayshawn Torrell Greer†	63 Va. App. 561	59
2015	Shavis Donta Holloman v. Commonwealth of Virginia†	65 Va. App. 147	38
2014	Thea Rachel Anthony v. Paul Skolnick-Lozano†	63 Va. App. 76	38
2014	Prince Adjei v. Commonwealth of Virginia†	63 Va. App. 727	31
2015	Andre Eugene Sanders v. Commonwealth of Virginia†	64 Va. App. 734	30
2018	Paramont Coal Company Virginia, LLC & Brickstreet Mutual Insurance Company v. Dewey J. McCoy†	819 S.E.2d 831	22
2017	Tina Marie Bryant v. Commonwealth of Virginia†	67 Va. App. 569	19
2017	Virginia Board of Medicine v. John Henry Hagmann, M.D.†	67 Va. App. 488	19

Showing the 15 most-cited of 26 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 Court of Appeals of Virginia reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is legislative election.
Which court is Maria Graff Decker on?: Maria Graff Decker is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Virginia.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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