Marla McCowan

Marla McCowan is the Deputy Director and Training Director with the Michigan Indigent Defense Commission.  Marla works with trial court funding units to facilitate implementation of new continuing legal education requirements for nearly 1,800 attorneys accepting assigned criminal cases in Michigan.  Marla also oversees day-to-day operations for the MIDC Staff which includes: statewide Regional Managers who provide ongoing assistance to court systems to comply with the MIDC’s standards for indigent defense; the Research Department, collecting data and analyzing impact of the MIDC’s work; and the Grants Department, responsible for distributing hundreds of millions of state dollars to local funding units for compliance with MIDC standards.  Prior to joining the MIDC, Marla served as a public defender at the appellate level for over sixteen years at the Michigan State Appellate Defender Office, nearly four of which included overseeing training for indigent defense practitioners around Michigan in her capacity as the Manager of SADO’s Criminal Defense Resource Center and Training Director at SADO.  While at SADO, Marla represented clients in cases in a variety of stages of appeals and post-conviction proceedings in Michigan and federal courts, including an argument in the United States Supreme Court.  Marla graduated from Eastern Michigan University (B.S. ’94) and University of Detroit Mercy School of Law (J.D. ’97).  She is a Fellow of the Michigan State Bar Foundation, a member of the Criminal Defense Attorneys of Michigan, a member of the National Association for Public Defense, and a member of the Michigan Women Lawyers Association.  Marla was nominated to be part of Michigan Lawyers Weekly’s 2018 class of Women in the Law and was voted “Woman of the Year” by her peers that year and received the State Bar of Michigan’s “Champion of Justice” award (Sept 2019).  In 2023, Marla was appointed as the MIDC’s designee to the Michigan Commission on Well-Being in the Law.