How do judges of the Florida District Courts of Appeal reach the bench?

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

Florida District Courts of Appeal / Joined 2007 / Active

Tonya Rainwater

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

Tonya Rainwater is a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, serving since 2007. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2007 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2007	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Education

Florida State University

Judicial Record

In our data, Rainwater authored 2 published opinions for the court (1993–2007). Most cited: Kindle v. Kindle (4 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. 1 of these was attributed to Rainwater 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
1993	Kindle v. Kindle	629 So. 2d 176	4
2007	Cruz v. Coughlin†	967 So. 2d 1001	0

Showing the 2 most-cited of 2 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 Florida District Courts of Appeal reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court is Tonya Rainwater on?: Tonya Rainwater is a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

19 years on the Florida District Courts of Appeal. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).