Sunday Mornings with Big Mitch: Ep. 5

Our American Stories

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture, Documentary

4.3 • 737 Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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.
In our fifth installment, Mitch reflects on the faith that steadied him through decades behind bars. He's watched men lose themselves to anger, but he learned to hold fast to something larger. What kept him steady was the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the Book of Daniel, a reminder that faith holds even when freedom does not. The Bible became a map for endurance, guiding him toward forgiveness and the strength to keep teaching others to hope. Before ending the call, he turns to a favorite topic—football—and shares his prediction for the next Super Bowl.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an I-Heart podcast.
0:02.5	Guaranteed Human.
0:14.2	This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories.
0:19.4	This next story is about a friend of mine. We're close in age, but have
0:24.1	little else in common. Mitchell Rutledge, aka Big Mitch, was born black and poor in Georgia.
0:31.2	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.
0:41.3	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.
0:53.5	Big Mitch spent the last 44 years of his life in Alabama prisons
0:58.4	for killing a man. But this is not a story about an innocent man sentenced to prison for a crime
1:05.9	he didn't commit. Big Mitch never denied the crime or made excuses for it.
1:12.4	This is the story of my friend's spiritual transformation while serving his life sentence.
1:18.6	It's also about a friendship only God could have engineered,
1:22.6	a friendship that began with a single Sunday morning call.
1:26.6	Through these weekly conversations, I hope you come to know and love him as much as I do.
1:32.3	Here's episode five, my conversation on February 11th, 2024, where Mitch begins describing
1:39.2	how it is impossible to survive prison as long as he has without God.
1:46.0	This is a free call from.
1:47.8	Venture Rutledge.
1:49.6	An incarcerated individual at Alabama Department of Corrections to accept this free call press.
1:55.5	One, to refuse this free call press.
1:58.0	Two, thank you for using.
	...

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