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

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

Supreme Court of Indiana / Joined 1985 / Served to 2012

Randall T. Shepard

Justice, Supreme Court of Indiana

Randall T. Shepard was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Indiana, who joined the court in 1985. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1927 · age 99
Tenure: 1985–2012 · 27 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1985	Supreme Court of Indiana	–	–

Education

Yale University

Judicial Record

In our data, Shepard authored 1,042 published opinions for the court (1985–2012), plus 84 dissents and 104 concurrences. Most cited: Drane v. State (1,243 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. 395 of these were attributed to Shepard 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	Drane v. State	867 N.E.2d 144	1,243
2007	Prewitt v. State	878 N.E.2d 184	592
1999	Sturgeon v. State	719 N.E.2d 1173	389
2010	EVERLING v. State	929 N.E.2d 1281	376
2002	Azania v. State· Dissent†	778 N.E.2d 1253	363
2001	Brown v. State	746 N.E.2d 63	363
2006	K.S. v. State†	849 N.E.2d 538	327
1997	Bieghler v. State	690 N.E.2d 188	316
2000	Ben-Yisrayl v. State	729 N.E.2d 102	315
2009	Bailey v. State	907 N.E.2d 1003	289
2001	Mangold Ex Rel. Mangold v. Indiana Department of Natural Resources· Concurrence†	756 N.E.2d 970	281
2005	Smylie v. State	823 N.E.2d 679	272
2002	McCary v. State	761 N.E.2d 389	268
1993	Weatherford v. State	619 N.E.2d 915	251
2002	Kirk v. Kirk	770 N.E.2d 304	249

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,230 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 Indiana reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Randall T. Shepard on?: Randall T. Shepard was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Indiana.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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