2026 Oklahoma judicial retention

Supreme Court

The OCPA has produced an Oklahoma judicial scorecard, reachable at oklajudges.com. The nine current Oklahoma Supreme Court justices have been graded based on their ruling in selected cases. A description of OCPA's scoring methodology states:

To score well, a justice will join in opinions which respect their role as the interpreter--not maker--of law. As John Marshall said in Marbury v. Madison, "it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." That means it's not the Court's role to say what the law should be. Furthermore, we score justices well who interpret the law based on the text as it was written by the legislature without finding ambiguity where none exists. In sum, we expect judicial officers to decide cases based on the facts and the law--not their own individual preferences.

Three of the four justices appointed by Gov. Kevin Stitt, Kane, Jett, and Kuehn, are on the 2026 retention ballot. All three have strong ratings from OCPA -- 79%, 84%, and 83% respectively. (By comparison, the three justices targeted by conservatives for defeat in 2024 -- Kauger, Gurich, and Edmondson -- had ratings of 18%, 18%, and 22% respectively.)

All three Stitt justices on the 2026 ballot lost points for ruling with the majority in this year's "NonDoc Media v. University of Oklahoma,":https://www.oscn.net/applications/oscn/DeliverDocument.asp?CiteID=551119 in which the court held by an 8-1 vote that the two reports prepared for OU by the Jones Day law firm, investigating rates of alumni donations and investigating accusations of gay sexual harassment by OU President David L. Boren and OU executive Tripp Hall, were protected from release under the Oklahoma Open Records Act by attorney-client privilege. Justice Dustin Rowe, Stitt's fourth appointee, was the only dissenter in that case. Kane's rating is also hurt by three recusals, which the OCPA overall rating seems to treat as negatively as a vote against the conservative position.

Kuehn also lost points for Ritter v. State, a 2022 decision in which the Court ruled against a law allowing school mask mandates only during a Governor-declared emergency. Kuehn voted with the 7-2 majority. (The two dissenters dissented only in part, concurring with the rest.) Kane recused in that case.

So the Stitt justices only get dinged for being as wrong as everyone else on the court on a couple of issues. Justice Richard B. Darby, a Mary Fallin appointee, is a different case.

Justice Darby has an OCPA rating of 52%. OCPA records that Darby voted the wrong way on Ritter v. State, Drummond v. Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board (the case that upheld the unconstitutional Blaine amendment and blocked creation of a Roman Catholic virtual charter school), and several cases touching on economic freedom and torts. One case stands out to me: Darby voted to throw out Oklahoma's requirement to notarize absentee ballots on procedural grounds. Happily, the Legislature quickly fixed the pretext on which the erroneous ruling was based.

Darby was also on the wrong side of the recent decision preemptively blocking State Question 843, a petition to change the law raising the homestead exemption from property tax to the full value of the home.

If we were voting on Darby vs. Gurich or Darby vs. Combs, I might vote to keep Darby as better than nothing. But on this retention ballot we're really choosing between Darby and giving Gov. Mazzei a chance to appoint a more reliable and consistent justice.

The judicial scorecard does not extend to the two appellate courts. I plan to vote for all of Governor Stitt's appointments. While my default in the absence of any information is to vote no (to cancel out someone else who reflexively votes yes), I don't want, ignorantly, to turf out a judge who is doing a good job. I will be reaching out to attorney friends to get their sense on the appellate judges.

Court of Criminal Appeals

Two Criminal Appeals terms expire this year, but only one will be filled by election. Robert L. Hudson is seeking another six-year term, while Gary Lumpkin is retiring, and Gov. Stitt will choose his replacement.

Browsing through recent decisions on the Court's website, I haven't found anything distressing. For the most part, the Criminal Appeals Court acts unanimously, with Judge David B. Lewis, the only remaining Democrat appointee, sometimes writing dissents or partial concurrences.

The Court of Criminal Appeals (except for Lewis) has been solid in pushing back against efforts to throw away Oklahoma's sovereignty in criminal matters. Hudson wrote the opinion for the Court in City of Tulsa v. O'Brien (2024) and concurred with the majority in Marvin Keith Stitt v. City of Tulsa (2025), and although he dissented in Deo v. Parish (2023), it was in objection to the majority's application of Castro-Huerta, not to the idea that the State of Oklahoma and its political subdivisions might in some cases have criminal jurisdiction over Indians. In "State v. Lawhorn (2021),:"https://www.oscn.net/applications/oscn/DeliverDocument.asp?CiteID=490227 Hudson wrote an eloquent concurrence pleading with Congress to fix the problems that McGirt created. My inclination is to keep Hudson.

Judge Lumpkin, who was appointed by Gov. Bellmon in 1988, and is the only judge ever to hold the District 3 seat, one of two new seats created in 1987, is retiring at the end of this year, which is the end of his current six-year term. Six candidates applied with the Judicial Nominating Commission to fill the vacancy. The JNC narrowed the options to three candidates:

• Mark Campbell, Bryan County District Judge
• Marion Fry, LeFlore County Associate District Judge
• Joe Trail, Coal County Associate District Judge

According to NonDoc, Trail is former chairman of the Pontotoc County Democratic Party, and Campbell was elected District Attorney as a Democrat. Campbell's three federal campaign contributions were all to Democrats: $250 to Wesley Clark for President in 2003, $500 to the John Kerry for President general election campaign in 2004, $250 to Dan Boren for Congress in 2005. Trail was a registered Democrat as recently as 2021 and is now registered independent, while Fry and Campbell have been registered Republicans since at least 2018. Fry served as an assistant DA in Tulsa County in the late '90s, which would mean serving under either Tim Harris or Steve Kunzweiler, both Republicans, but the only donation that turns up on Open Secrets in Fry's name was in 2009 to Kenneth Corn, a Democrat candidate for Lieutenant Governor.

The JNC seems determined to put Campbell on a higher court, having twice put his name forward for a Supreme Court vacancy and once for the Court of Civil Appeals. Govs. Fallin (once) and Stitt (twice) have bypassed Campbell for other options.

You could see how the JNC could steer the Governor into choosing their preferred candidate by surrounding him by two candidates that would be plainly unacceptable to him. Oklahoma needs to get rid of the JNC and have the Governor appoint appellate judges with the advice and consent of the Senate. Until we have that option, SQ 845 at least gives the Governor, who is accountable to the voters, more discretion over his appointees to the JNC and the possibility of conservative attorneys serving on the JNC on an equal footing to the OBA's picks.

In my article about the 2020 judicial retention ballot, I wrote, "If you believe the treatment of Oklahoma City Police officer Daniel Holtzclaw is unjust, you will want to vote against both Court of Criminal Appeals judges up for retention, Hudson and Lumpkin; both voted to reject Holtzclaw's appeal." Earlier this year, the leading voice from the Right preaching Holtzclaw's innocence parachuted in from Colorado to support dark-money-backed, pro-criminal non-profit founder Colleen McCarty's unsuccessful run for the Republican nomination for Tulsa County District Attorney. This was followed up in August with a bizarre video attacking Libs of TikTok and defending a liberal Oklahoma County district judge over the crime spree of Kofi Asare. As a result, I'm not inclined to give any credence to this person's views of criminal justice in Oklahoma at all, and I would not consider the unanimous denial of Holtzclaw's appeal a basis for denying a judge's retention. (If you need some really disgusting reading material, read the recitation of Holtzclaw's crimes.)

Court of Civil Appeals

James R. Huber was appointed by Gov. Stitt in 2023 and received an initial retention vote of 64.53% in 2024. Stacie Hixon was appointed by Stitt in 2020 and retained by 67.34% of the voters in 2022. Both are registered Republicans and have been since at least 2018. I'm inclined to retain all of Stitt's nominees.

I've written consistently since her appointment in 2005 that Jane Wiseman does not belong on any court. As a district judge in 2003, Wiseman demonstrated partiality toward the rich and powerful by approving the unconstitutional logrolling in the Vision 2025 ballot. Her 2003 decision ignored her own reasoning eight years earlier when she rightly discarded a sales tax proposal for the new county jail because it included funds for early intervention programs on the same ballot item as funds for the jail's construction and operation.

In October 2014, Wiseman officiated over the first "legal" "same-sex wedding" in Oklahoma, showing her solidarity not with the people who voted overwhelmingly to uphold the only definition of marriage that makes sense, but instead with the leftist fascists who seek to impose their morality on every state. Wiseman demonstrated her support for judges legislating from the bench, for seeing the voters of Oklahoma as subjects to be subdued, not a sovereign, self-governing people.

Deborah Barnes is the other Brad Henry Civil Appeals nominee on the ballot. Governor Stitt passed Barnes over in 2019 for a Supreme Court vacancy in favor of John Kane. She is a registered Democrat.