Sunday Mornings with Big Mitch: Ep. 10
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 28 December 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, every Sunday, Our American Stories host Lee Habeeb speaks with Mitchel "Big Mitch" Rutledge, who has spent more than forty years serving a life sentence in Alabama. Each call traces the shape of faith, regret, and forgiveness inside a place built for punishment.
This time, Mitch revisits the uncertain two weeks between his sentencing hearing and the judge's final decision. That stretch of time pulled a lot into focus, and eventually led him to write "A World Within a World," a poem about growing up locked away from the life most people take for granted. He also talks about death row: the silence, the rituals, and the men who disappeared one by one. The episode closes with "Disdain," a piece about resisting the slow pull toward bitterness when hope feels out of reach.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.1 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. |
| 0:19.3 | This next story is about a friend of mine. We're close in age, but have |
| 0:24.0 | little else in common. Mitchell Rutledge, aka Big Mitch, was born black and poor in Georgia. |
| 0:31.0 | I was born kind of brown and middle class in New Jersey. He never met his father. I still talked to my 94-year-old father every week. |
| 0:41.0 | He dropped out of high school in his early teens and was illiterate into his early 20s. |
| 0:46.6 | I was surrounded by books growing up and finished graduate school in my early 30s. |
| 0:52.6 | Big Mitch spent the last 44 years of his life in Alabama prisons for |
| 0:57.8 | killing a man. But this is not a story about an innocent man sentenced to prison for a crime he |
| 1:04.9 | didn't commit. Big Mitch never denied the crime or made excuses for it. This is the story of my friend's spiritual |
| 1:13.8 | transformation while serving his life sentence. It's also about a friendship only God could have |
| 1:20.2 | engineered, a friendship that began with a single Sunday morning call. Through these weekly |
| 1:26.3 | conversations, I hope you come to know and love him as much as I do. |
| 1:31.1 | Here's episode 10, our conversation on March 17th, 2024, where Mitch begins by describing his |
| 1:38.1 | final chance at getting off death row, illustrating what it was like to sit and wait as the fate of his life |
| 1:46.7 | hung in the balance. |
| 1:49.4 | This is a free call from Mitchell Rutledge. |
| 1:53.0 | An incarcerated individual at Alabama Department of Corrections. |
| 1:57.2 | To accept this free call press, one, this pre call press two thank you for using |
| 2:02.9 | securus you may start the conversation now i was going back to be sentenced the third time the first |
| 2:12.4 | two times uh i was uh sentenced to death the third time I go back, my lawyer told me, |
... |
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