When Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens walks into a federal courtroom in Jackson this summer, one of the lead voices speaking for him will be a Washington, DC, attorney most people in Mississippi have never heard of. His name is Warren Gary Kohlman, and his career reads like a tour through some of the biggest federal cases of the last fifty years.

Kohlman has been on the Owens defense team since the very beginning. He appeared at the November 2024 arraignment, alongside local counsel from Carroll Bufkin in Ridgeland, and he is still appearing in May and June of this year as the case heads to trial. He is admitted to practice in his home jurisdiction and has been brought into this case by special permission of the court.

His background is striking.

Kohlman graduated from the University of Michigan in 1968 and from the University of Michigan Law School in 1971, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif for finishing in the top ten percent of his class. After a clerkship on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, he joined the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where he worked from 1973 to 1982, eventually serving as Training Director and Chief of the Trial Division. The Public Defender Service in DC is widely considered one of the most prestigious indigent defense offices in the country.

While he was Training Director, Kohlman trained a young lawyer named Charles Ogletree, who later became one of the most influential civil rights lawyers in America and a longtime Harvard Law School professor. A DC Superior Court judge once called him an outstanding trial attorney. He has argued before the United States Supreme Court.

For Jackson readers, the most resonant chapter of his career may be one that began more than forty years ago. In the wake of the FBI's notorious ABSCAM sting, Kohlman represented former Congressman John Jenrette. ABSCAM was the operation in which the FBI, using undercover agents posing as wealthy Arab investors, captured members of Congress on hidden camera accepting bribes. It became the template for almost every federal corruption sting that followed, including, in many of its features, the one that produced the case against Owens. The lawyer who fought the FBI's playbook in the 1980s is the lawyer at the defense table in 2026.

That is not the only headline case on his resume. In the 1980s, Kohlman defended an FBI agent, H. Edward Tickel, in a series of criminal cases including a robbery of the FBI credit union. From 1985 to 1986 he represented Larry Wu-tai Chin, the CIA Chinese language translator convicted of selling classified documents to the People's Republic of China.

After leaving the Public Defender Service, Kohlman moved into private practice, eventually joining the DC firm Bredhoff & Kaiser, where he worked until 2014. He later became general counsel to the National Basketball Players Association, the union for NBA players. There, according to the DC Attorney General's office, he successfully represented players in a $70 billion collective bargaining negotiation. In 2018, DC Attorney General Karl A. Racine appointed Kohlman as Senior Counsel for Litigation, calling him “one of the country's best trial lawyers.”

His specialty over the decades, according to the DC Attorney General's office, has been labor law, complex civil litigation, employee tax and benefits law, and white collar criminal defense. The Owens case sits squarely in that last category.

What it means for the trial here is hard to predict. Resumes do not win cases. But the defense Jody Owens has assembled is not local talent alone. It includes a Washington lawyer who has spent half a century in federal courtrooms, including against the same kind of FBI sting operation now at the heart of this prosecution.

Jackson is about to see what that experience looks like in practice.