Sunday Mornings with Big Mitch: Ep. 13
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 15 February 2026
⏱️ 11 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 for killing a man. Mitch has never denied his crime or offered excuses for it. Instead, their conversations focus on what responsibility, faith, and accountability look like when lived out behind prison walls.
In this episode, Mitch begins with a story about how a simple act of kindness toward an elderly man planted the seed for his belief in sharing God’s grace with others. He then shares another experience in which an act of generosity didn’t have the impact he intended but ultimately taught him an important lesson about being wise with charity and discerning where it will truly make a difference.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:14.1 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. |
| 0:19.2 | 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. |
| 0:31.1 | 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. |
| 0:46.3 | 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 |
| 1:04.7 | he 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 |
| 1:20.1 | 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. |
| 1:31.3 | Here's episode 13, our conversation on June 24th, 2024, where Mitch begins by sharing a story |
| 1:38.4 | about how a random act of kindness on his part would touch another man's life in a way he could only describe as being |
| 1:46.4 | God sent. Take it away, Mitch. |
| 1:50.0 | This is a free call from... |
| 1:52.1 | Mitchell Rutnitch. |
| 1:54.5 | An incarcerated individual at Alabama Department of Corrections. |
| 1:59.2 | To accept this free call press, one, to refuse refuse this free call press, two, thank you for using |
| 2:05.0 | Securus. |
... |
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