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 1990 / Served to 1998

Morris L. Overstreet

Judge, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

Morris L. Overstreet was a Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, who joined the court in 1990. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1950 · age 76
Tenure: 1990–1998 · 8 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1990	Texas Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Overstreet authored 100 published opinions for the court (1990–1998), plus 65 dissents and 23 concurrences. Most cited: Mosley v. State (2,969 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. 107 of these were attributed to Overstreet 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
1998	Mosley v. State· Dissent†	983 S.W.2d 249	2,969
1997	Santellan v. State	939 S.W.2d 155	1,995
1997	McDuff v. State	939 S.W.2d 607	1,412
1996	Villarreal v. State· Dissent†	935 S.W.2d 134	1,246
1998	Jackson v. State· Dissent†	973 S.W.2d 954	1,105
1991	Ater v. Eighth Court of Appeals	802 S.W.2d 241	1,090
1997	Cain v. State· Concurrence†	947 S.W.2d 262	1,033
1996	Rhoades v. State· Dissent†	934 S.W.2d 113	959
1997	Woods v. State· Dissent†	956 S.W.2d 33	905
1995	Curry v. State	910 S.W.2d 490	826
1998	Colburn v. State· Concurrence†	966 S.W.2d 511	754
1995	Broxton v. State· Dissent†	909 S.W.2d 912	738
1997	Cantu v. State· Concurrence†	939 S.W.2d 627	612
1996	Janecka v. State· Dissent†	937 S.W.2d 456	587
1995	King v. State	895 S.W.2d 701	564

Showing the 15 most-cited of 190 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 was Morris L. Overstreet on?: Morris L. Overstreet was 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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8 years on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).