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they always get away.

- Are you following him?

- Yep.

We don't need you to.

Do you think he's yelling "help"?

- Yes.

- All right, what is your...

A deadly shooting in Sanford.

Police have the gun,

they've got the shooter,

but they have not arrested him.

Zimmerman,

armed with a gun,

followed this

quote, unquote suspicious kid

after the dispatcher told him not to.

They ended up on the ground in a fight,

and George Zimmerman

shot and killed Trayvon Martin.

The police could not arrest Zimmerman

because of this Florida law called

Stand Your Ground,

which says that you can kill someone

if you feel threatened.

Even though it was Zimmerman

who had pursued Martin

throughout the neighborhood with a gun.

Mr. Zimmerman felt that he,

in self-defense, needed to, uh...

to fire his weapon.

Not only was he not arrested,

but in court,

Zimmerman actually pleaded self-defense

and got off

under the Stand Your Ground law.

We, the jury,

find George Zimmerman not guilty.

That Stand Your Ground law

that was passed in Florida

played a huge role

in the Trayvon Martin tragedy

and this really ignited the movement

that we see today.

In the wake

of Trayvon Martin's death,

Florida's Stand Your Ground law

came into the spotlight.

How did this law not only get in place

in Florida, but around the country?

And all the fingers kept pointing

back to ALEC.

ALEC sounds like the name

of a high school lacrosse player

who just got baked

and wrecked his dad's Saab.

But incredibly, it's actually even worse.

- ALEC is a political lobbying group.

- ALEC is a political lobbying group.

- They write laws...

- They write laws...

- and give them to Republicans.

- and give them to Republicans.

- Stand Your Ground...

- Stand Your Ground...

- was written by ALEC.

- was written by ALEC.

ALEC is this private club,

and its members are

politicians and corporations.

But the real question is,

should politicians and corporations

be in the same private club?

Under the umbrella of ALEC

corporate members, uh, get to propose laws

to their political counterparts,

most of whom are Republicans.

So, through ALEC, corporations have

a huge say in our lawmaking.

And at ALEC task force meetings,

corporate lobbyists

secretly vote as equals with lawmakers

on bills that those lawmakers

then introduce

to become laws in our states.

ALEC is everywhere.

Roughly one in four state legislators

are members.

And I'm proud to stand with ALEC today.

And it's not hard to see why.

ALEC makes their jobs troublingly easy.

Here's their model

Electricity Freedom bill,

which at one point says,

"Be it therefore enacted,

that the State of repeals

the renewable energy mandate."

So, as long as you can remember

and spell the name of your state,

you can introduce legislation.

We've also seen ALEC bills introduced

where a lawmaker forgot

to take the ALEC letterhead off the bill.

Without remembering to take off

the ALEC letterhead

to try to distance the real role of ALEC

and ALEC corporations from those bills.

I'm just curious. Does it have...

Does the legislation have

some connection to ALEC?

Representative Atkins, I'm not sure why

we're pursuing this course of questioning.

This bill is my bill.

It's not ALEC's bill.

The reason I ask is because

earlier you passed out a handout

that says "Gottwalt" at the top,

and it says "Health Care Compact,"

and there's a logo

right in the middle of that page.

And I went to the ALEC website,

and there's exactly the same font,

the same size and the same logo.

I mean, literally, it's verbatim.

It's shocking to know

that ALEC has been around

for more than four decades now.

And it's even more startling

to see how it began.

ALEC has forged

a unique partnership

between state legislators and leaders

from the corporate and business community.

Corporations have influenced

laws for decades, through ALEC.

They want everybody to vote.

I don't want everybody to vote.

As a matter of fact, our leverage

in the elections quite candidly goes up

as the voting populace goes down.

Nearly every ALEC bill

benefits one of its corporate funders.

And the corporation Wal-Mart

was a long-standing member of ALEC

at the time that it adopted

the so-called Stand Your Ground law.

It's a law that created

an atmosphere where gun sales boomed.

Wal-Mart is the biggest seller

of long guns in the US,

has been the largest retailer

of bullets in the world.

So it's reasonable to think

that Wal-Mart benefited

from these Stand Your Ground laws

that ALEC pushed

that initially prevented the arrest

of the killer of Trayvon Martin, uh,

and was designed to prevent the arrest,

prosecution and conviction

of the killer of Trayvon Martin, including

through changing the jury instructions

to require that a jury be told

that someone like George Zimmerman

has a right to stand his ground,

but not that someone like Trayvon Martin

has a right to stand his ground

against someone like George Zimmerman

with a gun assailing him.

After the outcry over Stand Your Ground

and the Trayvon Martin tragedy...

Wal-Mart stepped out of ALEC.

It left ALEC, abandoned ALEC.

But the Wal-Mart family

continues to fund ALEC.

Other corporations

followed suit and stepped away from ALEC,

but many corporations

are still members, including...

Koch Industries,

State Farm Insurance,

PhRMA, which is the lobbying group

for the pharmaceutical industry.

ALEC has been supported

by the tobacco industry

as well as AT&T and Verizon.

And for nearly two decades,

one corporation was

Corrections Corporation of America.

Every day,

we serve our communities.

From small towns to large cities,

at more than 60 locations

across our country.

As the nation's fifth largest

correctional system,

we build, own and manage

secure correctional facilities.

CCA was the first

private prison corporation in the US.

It started as a small company,

in Tennessee, in 1983.

These folks started

making contracts with states.

And they had to protect their investments,

so the states were required

to keep these prisons filled

even if nobody was committing a crime.

And in the late '80s and early '90s,

this became a growth industry

unlike very few growth industries

in America's history.

Uh, it was absolutely

a model guaranteed to succeed.

And one of the ways we see that

is through the role of CCA within ALEC

to advance a series of bills.

All the legislation you could think of

that we fight so hard against,

"three strikes, you're out..."

Three strikes and you are out.

...mandatory minimum sentencing laws...

...serve at least 85% of their sentence.

...were the ones

they were putting out there

like on a premiere

pre-fixed dinner menu,

a steady influx of bodies

to generate the profit

that would go to the shareholders.

Through ALEC,

CCA became the leader in private prisons.

It's a multibillion-dollar business today

that gets rich off punishment.

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