Andrew Jarecki

went to incredible lengths to try to tie him into an earlier altercation that night because nobody died in, but they were sort of trying to say, well, he was involved in a robbery, which he actually wasn't involved in, um, because that enables you to give him a life sentence because you can say it's capital murder.

Yeah.

So, so I guess our, our, um, you know, kind of, uh,

theory going in was maybe we don't need to talk about the crimes at all.

And then we realized that there are certain crimes, right?

And Steve Marshall of the world will want you to assume that everybody's in there for this, right?

They say, oh, we've already let out all the nonviolent criminals.

That sounds like totally reasonable.

Well, yeah, I guess people that are nonviolent should be let out, right?

But in Alabama, I think in the rest of the country, maybe we have like, maybe in the federal system, we have like four crimes that are considered violent.

And in Alabama, it used to be 10, and then it was 20, and then it was 30, and now it's 44 crimes.

And they include entering an unoccupied building.

That's considered a violent crime.

So by redefining what a violent crime is, you get more and more and more people, and then you get to stand in front of a crowd and say, we've let out all the good ones.

But Robert Earl, I guess we concluded that we had to tell something about some of the crimes because we felt like if the audience was going to really have to fall in love with Robert Earl, which is not hard to do because man's a genius and he's an unbelievable human being, then we would have to let people know that he's not Jeffrey Dahmer.

You know, that he's not somebody who's like a serial killer or a child killer.

And the percentage of people that are in prison who are serial killers or child killers is minuscule.

But if you're gonna give the audience the desire to fall in love with somebody, they're gonna hold back.

their empathy, unless you can just give them a little bit of a pass, a little bit of a feeling like this is, this is not one of those people that's just going to be released and then immediately go and murder somebody or push somebody in front of a bus.

It's a really good question.