Sunday Mornings with Big Mitch: Ep. 15
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 22 March 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. Each call traces the shape of faith, regret, and forgiveness inside a place built for punishment.
As the series comes to a close, Mitch reflects on what those years have taught him about freedom and bondage. Prison, he explains, is not only a physical place. A person can be trapped by anger, bitterness, or regret just as easily as by walls and bars. Looking back now, Mitch believes life returns what a person plants in it, and he hopes anyone listening might take that lesson seriously and begin their own search for freedom.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.3 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:10.2 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. |
| 0:15.3 | This next story is about a friend of mine. |
| 0:18.4 | We're close in age, but have little else in common. |
| 0:22.0 | Mitchell Rutledge, aka Big Mitch, was born black and poor in Georgia. I was born kind |
| 0:28.2 | of brown and middle class in New Jersey. He never met his father. I still talked to my 94-year-old |
| 0:35.1 | father every week. He dropped out of high school in his early teens and was illiterate into his early |
| 0:41.3 | 20s. |
| 0:42.6 | I was surrounded by books growing up and finished graduate school in my early 30s. |
| 0:48.7 | Big Mitch spent the last 44 years of his life in Alabama prisons for killing a man. But this is not a story about an |
| 0:57.9 | innocent man sentenced to prison for a crime he didn't commit. Big Mitch never denied the crime or made |
| 1:05.5 | excuses for it. This is the story of my friend's spiritual transformation while serving his life sentence. |
| 1:13.6 | It's also about a friendship only God could have engineered, a friendship that began with a single |
| 1:19.3 | Sunday morning call. |
| 1:21.5 | Through these weekly conversations, I hope you come to know and love him, as much as I do. |
| 1:27.2 | Here's episode 15, the final episode, |
| 1:30.4 | our conversation on February 19th, 2026, |
| 1:34.6 | where Mitch begins by describing the many forms of bondage |
| 1:37.8 | that hold people back from true freedom. |
| 1:41.1 | Let's take a listen. |
| 1:43.3 | This is a free call from |
... |
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