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

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

Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals / Joined 1977 / Active

Tom R. Cornish

Judge, Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals

Tom R. Cornish is a Judge of the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals (5 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), serving since 1977. He previously served on the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1944 · age 82
Tenure: Since 1977 · 49 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1977	Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–
–	Bankr. Eastern District of Oklahoma	Tenth Circuit	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Cornish authored 340 published opinions for the court (1977–1984), plus 6 dissents and 18 concurrences. Most cited: Burks v. State (375 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. 109 of these were attributed to Cornish 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
1979	Burks v. State	594 P.2d 771	375
1980	Bruner v. State	612 P.2d 1375	147
1980	Irvin v. State	617 P.2d 588	123
1983	Boutwell v. State	659 P.2d 322	119
1983	Johnson v. State	665 P.2d 815	118
1982	Jones v. State	648 P.2d 1251	117
1980	Renfro v. State	607 P.2d 703	115
1980	Hays v. State	617 P.2d 223	97
1984	Dutton v. State	674 P.2d 1134	95
1982	Burrows v. State· Concurrence†	640 P.2d 533	84
1983	Stafford v. State	665 P.2d 1205	80
1983	Cooper v. State	671 P.2d 1168	79
1983	Nauni v. State	670 P.2d 126	73
1982	Kennedy v. State	640 P.2d 971	73
1981	Cobbs v. State	629 P.2d 368	67

Showing the 15 most-cited of 364 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 Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court is Tom R. Cornish on?: Tom R. Cornish is a Judge of the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals.

Sources

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

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