From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Alex Goldman, and I'm PJ vote.

And Shiki Kitten-Mineini is also in the room.

Yes, I'm here.

And this is the final installment of the On the Inside series, which Shruthe has been reporting.

If you haven't listened to the first three episodes, go back and listen to them, or you will be thoroughly confused.

A refresher for people who have heard.

So this is a story of Paul Medrawski.

He's a convicted murderer with a blog that his mom, Up until pretty recently, published and edited for him.

Paul says that he's innocent, that basically he's just an autistic person who's been badly misunderstood.

Right, exactly.

And I've been reporting on this story for what seems like forever at this point, and all the possibilities have boiled down to be.

Basically two things.

Either Paul is, as you said, like misunderstood, wrongly convicted, or he's a remorseless killer who has just gotten really good at telling the story of being misunderstood.

This whole question of who Paul is, it actually played out after the trial at a sentencing hearing.

So at this point, Paul's been convicted, people have decided he is guilty of killing Dean Fawcett.

And now they have to decide whether or not, like what kind of person is he? Is he irredeemably evil?

And that will inform what kind of sentence he gets.

Exactly. Right.

And so here we're sitting in the courtroom again. There's no jury. It's just a judge who's going to decide the sentence.

And there's the people, like Paul's family, testifying to who he is.

And I spoke to this reporter, John Carpenter, who covered these hearings.

So when Paul Madraski's father was testifying about something along the lines of, you know, at one time I fell down and he came and carried me in his arms, you know, helped me.

...