This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories.

This next story is about a friend of mine. We're close in age,

but have little else in common. Mitchell Rutledge, aka Big Mitch, was born black and poor

in Georgia. 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.

He dropped out of high school in his early teens and was illiterate into his early 20s.

I was surrounded by books growing up and finished graduate school in my early 30s.

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 innocent man sentenced to prison

for a crime he didn't commit. Big Mitch never denied the crime or made excuses for it.

This is the story of my friend's spiritual transformation while serving his life sentence.

It's also about a friendship only God could have engineered, a friendship that began with a

single Sunday morning call. Through these weekly conversations,

I hope you come to know and love him, as much as I do.

Welcome to Sunday mornings with Big Mitch.

Here's episode four, my conversation on February 4th,

2024, where Mitch has his first encounter with true love.

This is a free call from...

Mitchell Rutnich.

An incarcerated individual at Alabama Department of Corrections.

To accept this free call press, one, to refuse this pre-call press. Two, thank you for using.

...