What about decanter made you enter, possibly for the first time, I'm guessing? What was the big impetus for Texas Wines to enter this year?

Honestly, James Tidwell and Jessica Dupuis told us to at Symposium.

And I think we were all kind of like, all right.

And some of our associations that we belong to were offering complimentary shipping and things that we just thought, okay, well, let's do it.

And talking to everyone, initially, it felt like everyone was going to enter one or two wines.

And then at least for Abastris, we just kind of went for it.

I think we entered six.

Yep.

And maybe in the back of my head, I wanted the judge to know that I'm not that same man that I was 12 years ago.

Your story really tracks with a lot of things that I felt and experienced as a criminal defense lawyer for many years.

And that's part of the reason why I started Sparrow, because I wanted to kind of conceive of a different form of legal advocacy and one that wasn't just predicated on crime.

legal issues alone, but on the whole person and on people, the human capacity to grow and change over time.

And whether or not those things are legally relevant, I feel like they are highly morally relevant.

And I wanted to kind of imagine a way of advocating for people where those things mattered.

That's beautiful, yo.

It sounds to me like your decision to kind of change and grow and become involved in positive activities in prison wasn't really connected to your desire to get out of prison so much as it was connected to your desire to just kind of live a meaningful life and show your family that you can be a different

I asked Kristen to lay out the habitual offender statute in layman's terms.

The law authorizes a prosecutor to charge a person, a person as a habitual offender if they have certain prior felony convictions, either two or three or more.

And if a prosecutor decides to charge a person as a habitual offender and the person is convicted, then the statute mandates that a judge impose an enhanced penalty that can be up to three or four times the pr- presumptive penalty for that crime if they hadn't been charged habitually.

So it is a mechanism to triple or quadruple or sometimes even put someone away for life for crimes that would otherwise carry a much less severe penalty.

Yeesh, 64 years.

I mean, I think proponents of the habitual offender law will say that, um, you know, it's the kind of the, the three strikes and you're out adage, so to speak, right? Like, you're not learning your lesson from, um, you know, prior, um, shorter sentences, and so therefore, we need to ratchet up the punishment against repeat offenders, so to speak.