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

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

Indiana Court of Appeals / Joined 2000 / Active

Michael P. Barnes

Judge, Indiana Court of Appeals

Michael P. Barnes is a Judge of the Indiana Court of Appeals, serving since 2000. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2000 · 26 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2000	Indiana Court of Appeals	–	–

Education

Saint Ambrose University

Judicial Record

In our data, Barnes authored 1,288 published opinions for the court (2000–2019), plus 43 dissents and 58 concurrences. Most cited: Rutherford v. State (605 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. 445 of these were attributed to Barnes 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
2007	Rutherford v. State	866 N.E.2d 867	605
2007	Stewart v. State	866 N.E.2d 858	223
2006	Gibson v. State	856 N.E.2d 142	155
2001	Carmichael v. Siegel	754 N.E.2d 619	112
2000	Termination of Parent-Child Relationship of A.P. v. Porter County Office of Family & Children†	734 N.E.2d 1107	110
2005	Davis v. State· Concurrence†	835 N.E.2d 1102	107
2010	Involuntary Termination of the Parent-Child Relationship of A.B. v. Marion County Department of Child Services†	924 N.E.2d 666	94
2011	Graham v. State	941 N.E.2d 1091	90
2002	Iddings v. State	772 N.E.2d 1006	85
2004	Lasater v. Lasater	809 N.E.2d 380	78
2003	Newsome v. State	797 N.E.2d 293	72
2014	Matthew Pavlovich v. State of Indiana· Concurrence†	6 N.E.3d 969	71
2005	Hope v. State	834 N.E.2d 713	68
2011	Graham v. State	947 N.E.2d 962	67
2005	Balicki v. Balicki	837 N.E.2d 532	67

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,389 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 Indiana Court of Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court is Michael P. Barnes on?: Michael P. Barnes is a Judge of the Indiana 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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26 years on the Indiana Court of Appeals. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).