How do judges of the Appellate Court of Illinois reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Appellate Court of Illinois / Joined 2002 / Served to 2015

Thenis Karnezis

Justice, Appellate Court of Illinois

Thenis Karnezis was a Justice of the Appellate Court of Illinois, who joined the court in 2002. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2002–2015 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2002	Appellate Court of Illinois	–	–

Education

University of Detroit Mercy

Judicial Record

In our data, Karnezis authored 152 published opinions for the court (2002–2012), plus 1 dissent and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Tully v. McLean (65 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. 17 of these were attributed to Karnezis 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
2011	Tully v. McLean	948 N.E.2d 714	65
2003	People v. Grant	791 N.E.2d 100	52
2006	Commerce Trust Co. v. Air 1st Aviation Companies, Inc.	851 N.E.2d 131	42
2003	In Re Custody of Ayala	800 N.E.2d 524	42
2005	People v. Bowman	827 N.E.2d 1062	38
2004	People v. Garner	808 N.E.2d 10	38
2003	People v. Washington	800 N.E.2d 436	35
2010	People v. Faria†	402 Ill. App. 3d 475	34
2002	Kane v. Motorola, Inc.	779 N.E.2d 302	33
2010	People v. Allen	929 N.E.2d 583	32
2009	People v. Tatum	906 N.E.2d 695	32
2008	Murphy v. Mancari's Chrysler Plymouth, Inc.	887 N.E.2d 569	32
2004	People v. James	810 N.E.2d 96	31
2008	Freeman v. Williamson	890 N.E.2d 1127	30
2011	People v. Gutierrez	954 N.E.2d 365	29

Showing the 15 most-cited of 154 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 Appellate Court of Illinois reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Thenis Karnezis on?: Thenis Karnezis was a Justice of the Appellate Court of Illinois.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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