Kathy Swedlow is the New CDRC Manager


The State Appellate Defender Office is pleased to announce that Kathy Swedlow has been named the Manager of SADO’s Criminal Defense Resource Center. The CDRC develops and administers statewide trainings for criminal defense attorneys, operates SADO’s web site (www.sado.org), and publishes a variety of books and manuals, including the popular Defender Books series. Kathy succeeds Marilena David, who managed the CDRC from 2015 to 2022 and who currently serves as SADO’s Deputy Director.

Kathy is an experienced administrator, teacher, author, and criminal defense attorney. From 2016-2021, Kathy was the Deputy Administrator of the Michigan Appellate Assigned Counsel System (MAACS), where she provided training and support to MAACS roster attorneys. From 2001-2016, Kathy was a Professor and Assistant Dean at WMU-Cooley Law School, where she taught Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and Death Penalty Law. She was also the co-director of the school’s Innocence Project and was co-counsel on the Project’s first DNA exoneration case. Before moving to Michigan in 2000, Kathy worked as an Assistant Federal Defender with the Capital Habeas Unit of the Defender Association of Philadelphia, where she represented death row prisoners in Pennsylvania. Kathy has also worked in the Staff Attorneys’ Offices in the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the Second, Third, and Sixth Circuits.
 
Kathy is the author of the SADO Defender Appellate Manual (2020) and three law school textbooks, published in 2017, 2021, and 2022; she is also a former contributing editor for death penalty cases for the ABA publication, Preview of United States Supreme Court Cases. She has conducted trainings for SADO and MAACS on a wide variety of substantive and procedural legal topics. Kathy is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University (B.S.) and City University of New York School of Law (J.D.).

If you are interested in developing training sessions or working as an author for the CDRC, or if you have ideas about ways the CDRC can better support the criminal defense bar, please contact Kathy directly at kswedlow@sado.org.