KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — A Tennessee inmate serving decades for a murder his lawyer says he didn’t commit is making an end-of-life appeal to spend his final days outside prison walls.
Gerald D. Thomas, 72, was convicted by a Loudon County jury in 2008 in the strangulation-shooting of Adwinna Hughes. It’s a crime that prominent defense attorney Stephen Ross Johnson argues his client never did — and he’s secured new forensic testing that he says proves it.
Diagnosed in 2023 with metastatic prostate cancer, Thomas is on morphine for pain and facing certain death at the state Department of Correction’s Turney Center Industrial Center in Only, Tenn…