West Virginia wisely abolished capital punishment in 1965. But, in 2021, we are sending innocent people — those who have not even been convicted of a crime — to their deaths.

West Virginia’s problems with mass incarceration are nothing new, but they’ve made the news repeatedly over the past year, especially the past week.

Last year, a Reuters report found our state’s regional jails to be the deadliest of any they examined in the nation. According to the Reuters’ numbers, a person in jail here was more than twice as likely to die as someone in a jail in Kentucky.

Read the rest of Eli's op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.