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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals / Joined 1983 / Served to 1997

Sam W. Taylor

Judge, Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals

Sam W. Taylor was a Judge of the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, who joined the court in 1983. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1935 · age 91
Tenure: 1983–1997 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1983	Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Education

The University of Alabama
The University of Alabama

Judicial Record

In our data, Taylor authored 1,303 published opinions for the court (1985–1997), plus 63 dissents and 23 concurrences. Most cited: Bankhead v. State (203 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. 686 of these were attributed to Taylor 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
1990	Bankhead v. State	585 So. 2d 97	203
1990	Henderson v. State	583 So. 2d 276	148
1993	Hallford v. State	629 So. 2d 6	136
1990	Duren v. State	590 So. 2d 360	133
1993	Burton v. State	651 So. 2d 641	127
1990	Stephens v. State	580 So. 2d 11	121
1993	Lancaster v. State	638 So. 2d 1370	117
1992	Williams v. State	601 So. 2d 1062	117
1996	Puckett v. State· Dissent†	680 So. 2d 980	109
1992	Jenkins v. State	627 So. 2d 1034	100
1993	State v. Tarver	629 So. 2d 14	97
1987	Whitlow v. State	509 So. 2d 252	97
1993	Breckenridge v. State· Dissent†	628 So. 2d 1012	92
1995	Hunt v. State	659 So. 2d 998	89
1994	Dobyne v. State	672 So. 2d 1319	86

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 Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Sam W. Taylor on?: Sam W. Taylor was a Judge of the Alabama 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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14 years on the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).