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 1995 / Former Judge

Sharon Keller

Judge, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

Sharon Keller was a Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, who joined the court in 1995. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1953 · age 73
Tenure: 1995 · 31 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1995	Texas Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Keller authored 307 published opinions for the court (1995–2018), plus 191 dissents and 169 concurrences. Most cited: Malik v. State (4,984 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. 588 of these were attributed to Keller 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
1997	Malik v. State	953 S.W.2d 234	4,984
2014	Kelly, Sylvester· Concurrence†	436 S.W.3d 313	3,246
1998	Mosley v. State†	983 S.W.2d 249	2,969
2000	Wesbrook v. State· Concurrence†	29 S.W.3d 103	2,816
2005	Dears v. State· Dissent†	154 S.W.3d 610	2,768
2000	King v. State	29 S.W.3d 556	2,680
1997	King v. State	953 S.W.2d 266	2,567
2007	Williams v. State· Dissent†	235 S.W.3d 742	2,009
2005	Goodspeed v. State†	187 S.W.3d 390	1,864
1996	McFarland v. State· Concurrence†	928 S.W.2d 482	1,746
2005	Ford v. State· Dissent†	158 S.W.3d 488	1,663
1996	Hutch v. State· Dissent†	922 S.W.2d 166	1,524
2002	Johnson v. State†	68 S.W.3d 644	1,505
2010	Isassi v. State· Dissent†	330 S.W.3d 633	1,500
1996	Dowthitt v. State	931 S.W.2d 244	1,429

Showing the 15 most-cited of 668 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 Sharon Keller on?: Sharon Keller 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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31 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).