ICON Honors 2024: Audrey Fleissig

Senior District Judge, Eastern District of Missouri, St. Louis

Senior District Judge Audrey G. Fleissig considers her work in establishing Sentencing Alternatives for Improving Lives (SAIL) the best thing she’s ever done in her career.

Described as an alternative-to-incarceration program, SAIL is designed to give local defendants with minimal criminal histories an opportunity to have their charges dismissed and turn their lives around.

“We work with people who we think have issues that have contributed to them being in the criminal justice system that we think we can address through intensive supervision,” she says. “We help them take stock of what’s going on in their lives, their barriers to success and try to help them eliminate those barriers.”

Before launching SAIL, Fleissig believed that the justice system’s approach to sentencing people to prison wasn’t working very well.

“I didn’t understand why we have let prison become our primary tool for addressing all the things that may have contributed to somebody being in the criminal justice system,” she says. “It’s very expensive in dollars and cents and the cost to the community and to families is even greater.”

Her efforts have paid off. She has continued to run the program, along with Judge Shirley Mensah and a dedicated team, since 2015. More than 75 percent of SAIL participants have successfully completed the program and graduated.

After receiving her J.D. from Washington University, she started her career in private practice at the St. Louis firm of Peper Martin Jensen Maichel and Hetlage (now Husch Blackwell).

In 2010, Fleissig was appointed as a U.S. district judge for the Eastern District of Missouri by President Barack Obama. Prior to taking the bench, Fleissig was a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District, where she also served as the Senate-confirmed United States Attorney for approximately one year.

She says public service “fits her like a glove,” and she feels lucky to have spent most of her career in the judicial branch of government.

“I’ve been lucky to have jobs that have given me the opportunity to make a difference,” she says.