WASHINGTON -- When the request came to testify this week to a Senate committee about solitary confinement, Damon Thibodeaux said he decided it was a great opportunity to share information -- though painful -- with people who "can actually make things better."

Thibodeaux, now 39, was exonerated and released in 2012 after 15 years in solitary confinement at Louisiana's Angola Prison's death row after DNA records showed he couldn't have been the person to murder and sexually assault a 14-year-old girl, whose body was found under the Huey P. Long Bridge in Jefferson Parish in 1996.

On Tuesday, he testified that solitary confinement produces indescribable physical, mental and emotional harm.

"I spent my years at Angola, while my lawyers fought to prove my innocence, in a cell that measured about 8 feet by 10 feet," Thibodeaux said. "It had three solid walls all painted white, a cell door, a sink, a toilet, a desk and seat attached to a wall, and an iron bunk with a thin mattress. These four walls are your life. Being in that environment for 23 hours a day will slowly kill you."

Thibodeaux asked the senators to contemplate what it says "about a nation that even before the law allows the state to execute a person, we're willing to let it kill them bit by bit and day by day" through solitary confinement. It's important, he told the senators, for a nation that takes other nations to task for human rights violations, not to allow practices that violate those same rights.

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Source: The Times-Picayune, Feb. 26, 2014