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 2007 / Active

Samuel H. Welch

Judge, Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals

Samuel H. Welch is a Judge of the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, serving since 2007. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1950 · age 76
Tenure: Since 2007 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2007	Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Education

The University of Alabama

Judicial Record

In our data, Welch authored 246 published opinions for the court (2007–2018), plus 80 dissents and 34 concurrences. Most cited: Lee v. State (68 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. 275 of these were attributed to Welch 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
2009	Lee v. State	44 So. 3d 1145	68
2007	Harris v. State	2 So. 3d 880	59
2009	Bush v. State†	92 So. 3d 121	45
2007	A.G. v. State· Concurrence†	989 So. 2d 1167	38
2011	Woodward v. State†	123 So. 3d 989	32
2011	Daniel v. State†	86 So. 3d 405	31
2008	Hooks v. State	21 So. 3d 772	29
2008	Sale v. State	8 So. 3d 330	27
2008	Davis v. State	9 So. 3d 539	27
2007	Waldrop v. State	987 So. 2d 1186	27
2012	Scott v. State†	163 So. 3d 389	25
2010	State of Alabama v. Thornal Lee Adams.†	91 So. 3d 724	25
2013	Hosch v. State†	155 So. 3d 1048	23
2010	Jarrod Taylor v. State of Alabama.†	157 So. 3d 131	23
2014	Shanklin v. State· Concurrence†	187 So. 3d 734	22

Showing the 15 most-cited of 360 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 is Samuel H. Welch on?: Samuel H. Welch is a Judge of the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals.

Sources

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

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19 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).