Mark Drozdowski is a part-time instructor at UCLA School of Law and teaches the field specialization at the Non-Capital Habeas Unit of the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Los Angeles (“the FPD”).  Mark has worked on capital and non-capital habeas corpus cases at the FPD for over 22 years.  He has conducted evidentiary hearings in federal and state court on the issues of ineffective assistance of counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, juror bias, shackling, actual innocence, and the competence of a death row inmate to waive his appeals and be executed.  He has filed briefs and argued habeas appeals in the United States Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  Mark was an assistant supervisor in the FPD's capital habeas unit from June 2003 through March 2006 and chief of the unit from March 2006 through January 2015.  Mark was named Outstanding Assistant Federal Public Defender In the Capital Habeas Unit in 2015 by the National Association of Federal Defenders.  He has been the chief of the FPD’s non-capital habeas unit since January 2017.  Mark joined the FPD in 1999 after working for five and a half years as an associate at the Los Angeles office of Arnold & Porter.

Mark received a B.A. from George Washington University in 1984.  He graduated with distinction and with special honors in political science and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.  Mark received an M.A. in political science from Yale University in 1987.  In 1993, he received a J.D. from UCLA.  At UCLA, Mark was a member and editor of the Law Review; had a note published in the Law Review; and was a teaching assistant in a Legal Research and Writing course.