How do judges of the Missouri Court of Appeals reach the bench?

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

Missouri Court of Appeals / Joined 1999 / Active

Thomas H. Newton

Judge, Missouri Court of Appeals

Thomas H. Newton is a Judge of the Missouri Court of Appeals, serving since 1999. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 1999 · 26 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1999	Missouri Court of Appeals	–	–

Education

Howard University
Howard University

Judicial Record

In our data, Newton authored 385 published opinions for the court (2000–2021), plus 1 dissent and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Blue v. Harrah's North Kansas City, LLC (75 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. 319 of these were attributed to Newton 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
2005	Blue v. Harrah's North Kansas City, LLC†	170 S.W.3d 466	75
2003	State v. Sprinkle†	122 S.W.3d 652	59
2001	Wright v. Barr†	62 S.W.3d 509	55
2012	Holmes v. Kansas City Missouri Board of Police Commissioners†	364 S.W.3d 615	47
2000	Lay v. P & G Health Care, Inc.†	37 S.W.3d 310	47
2009	Plubell v. Merck & Co., Inc.	289 S.W.3d 707	46
2002	State v. Rose†	86 S.W.3d 90	43
2004	Selby v. Selby†	149 S.W.3d 472	37
2008	State v. Chism†	252 S.W.3d 178	36
2005	Medley v. Valentine Radford Communications, Inc.†	173 S.W.3d 315	35
2011	Mitchell v. Residential Funding Corp.	334 S.W.3d 477	32
2001	Weisenburger v. City of St. Joseph†	51 S.W.3d 119	31
2003	State v. Daniel†	103 S.W.3d 822	28
2009	Shobe v. Kelly†	279 S.W.3d 203	26
2004	Kraus v. Hy-Vee, Inc.†	147 S.W.3d 907	26

Showing the 15 most-cited of 387 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 Missouri Court of Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court is Thomas H. Newton on?: Thomas H. Newton is a Judge of the Missouri Court of Appeals.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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