How do judges of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Texas Court of Criminal Appeals / Joined 2017 / Active

Mary Lou Keel

Judge, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

Mary Lou Keel is a Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, serving since 2017. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2017 · 9 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2017	Texas Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Keel authored 8 published opinions for the court (2017–2019). Most cited: Prine v. State (135 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. 8 of these were attributed to Keel 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	Prine v. State†	537 S.W.3d 113	135
2018	Hernandez v. State†	538 S.W.3d 619	96
2019	Ruiz, Lauro Eduardo†	577 S.W.3d 543	70
2018	Rogers, William†	550 S.W.3d 190	41
2017	State v. Jarreau†	512 S.W.3d 352	32
2017	Lee v. State†	537 S.W.3d 924	27
2017	Ex parte Evans†	537 S.W.3d 109	12
2019	Cuevas, Jeremy Jay†	576 S.W.3d 398	6

Showing the 8 most-cited of 8 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 Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court is Mary Lou Keel on?: Mary Lou Keel is a Judge of the Texas 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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9 years on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Data as of 2026-07-02. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).