Professor Meredith Esser’s Scholarship Centers on Rethinking Punishment After Sentencing

Professor Meredith Esser’s scholarship is inspired by litigation she handled as a public defender. Her recent article, Unpunishment Purposes (Minnesota Law Review, published March 2025), draws on nearly a decade of real-world criminal defense experience to rethink what sentencing purposes mean after a sentence has already been imposed. As the professor explains, “I spent eight years as an Assistant Federal Public Defender in post-conviction and appellate fields,” work that became especially urgent after “in 2018, Congress passed a sweeping reform to federal sentencing law, which allowed people to petition for lesser sentences.” That shift opened a new chapter in sentencing practice—one that the professor lived firsthand: “I spent a lot of COVID and post-COVID years working on this type of advocacy.”

In Unpunishment Purposes, Professor Esser argues that the traditional framework of punishment — deterrence, retribution, incapacitation, and rehabilitation — doesn’t translate cleanly into the post-sentencing world. She remarks that this framework “is pointed in the direction for more punishment, instead of less.” The article takes on that imbalance directly, deconstructing conventional punishment purposes through the lens of second look sentencing and retroactive relief mechanisms, while also grounding theory in the lived realities of incarceration and its impact on families and communities. Ultimately, Professor Esser’s work offers courts a more humane and coherent framework for resentencing: one that can shape not only post-sentencing review but also “can be useful in an initial sentencing.” 

In two recent law review publications, Professor Esser examines whether the harms people experience while incarcerated should factor into post-sentencing relief. In Who Bears the Burden When Prison Guards Rape?, 109 IOWA L. REV. ONLINE 188 (2024), she focuses on institutional sexual abuse at a notorious federal prison in California and how such abuse can support petitions for early release. That theme continues in Extraordinary Punishment: Conditions of Confinement and Compassionate Release, 92 FORDHAM L. REV. 1369 (2024), which explores whether severe conditions of confinement can serve as a basis for sentence reduction through second-look sentencing, including compassionate release. Together, these pieces highlight the limits of prisoners’ rights litigation and argue for resentencing frameworks that take the realities of incarceration into account.