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 1971 / Served to 1984

Wendell Albert Odom

Judge, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

Wendell Albert Odom was a Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, who joined the court in 1971. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1920 · age 106
Tenure: 1971–1984 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1971	Texas Court of Criminal Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Odom authored 931 published opinions for the court (1971–1985), plus 64 dissents and 56 concurrences. Most cited: Alejandro v. State (877 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. 541 of these were attributed to Odom 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
1973	Alejandro v. State	493 S.W.2d 230	877
1972	Albrecht v. State	486 S.W.2d 97	705
1984	Wicker v. State	667 S.W.2d 137	429
1981	Thomas v. State†	621 S.W.2d 158	428
1978	Dillon v. State†	574 S.W.2d 92	372
1977	Basaldua v. State· Concurrence†	558 S.W.2d 2	360
1976	Day v. State· Separate†	532 S.W.2d 302	359
1979	Jones v. State†	589 S.W.2d 419	355
1983	Hawkins v. State· Separate†	660 S.W.2d 65	351
1974	American Plant Food Corporation v. State	508 S.W.2d 598	339
1978	Crocker v. State· Separate†	573 S.W.2d 190	336
1984	Hudson v. State· Dissent†	675 S.W.2d 507	318
1980	Quinones v. State· Dissent†	592 S.W.2d 933	312
1981	Rudd v. State†	616 S.W.2d 623	286
1980	Brasfield v. State· Separate†	600 S.W.2d 288	278

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,113 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 Wendell Albert Odom on?: Wendell Albert Odom 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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13 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).