How do judges of the Supreme Court of Mississippi reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Mississippi / Joined 1964 / Served to 1986

Neville Patterson

Justice, Supreme Court of Mississippi

Neville Patterson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi, who joined the court in 1964. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1916 · age 110
Tenure: 1964–1986 · 22 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1964	Supreme Court of Mississippi	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Patterson authored 446 published opinions for the court (1964–1986), plus 10 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Jones v. State (362 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. 277 of these were attributed to Patterson 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
1980	Jones v. State	381 So. 2d 983	362
1985	Cabello v. State	471 So. 2d 332	348
1983	Tokman v. State	435 So. 2d 664	262
1975	Newell v. State	308 So. 2d 71	242
1984	Lanier v. State	450 So. 2d 69	232
1979	Gandy v. State†	373 So. 2d 1042	157
1986	Irving v. State	498 So. 2d 305	132
1983	Alexander v. State by and Through Allain	441 So. 2d 1329	97
1986	Hill v. Dunaway	487 So. 2d 807	87
1973	Jenkins v. Jenkins	278 So. 2d 446	65
1969	Catholic Diocese of Natchez-Jackson v. Jaquith	224 So. 2d 216	54
1972	Butler v. Chrestman	264 So. 2d 812	52
1970	Harrell v. Harrell	231 So. 2d 793	47
1969	Cummings v. State	219 So. 2d 673	47
1981	Davis v. State	406 So. 2d 795	46

Showing the 15 most-cited of 460 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 Supreme Court of Mississippi reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Neville Patterson on?: Neville Patterson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi.

Sources

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

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