In February 2024, John Walter Lay went to go enjoy the outdoors at a local dog park in Florida. Everything should have been simple: he should have enjoyed a nice walk, had a good day, and gone home peacefully.
Instead, someone took his life as part of a homophobically-motivated hate crime.Sign the petition to demand justice.While John Walter Lay was out, another man approached him and began hurling bigoted, homophobic slurs at him. Then, he chose to escalate the situation even further - revealing a gun and threatening John Walter with it.
Ultimately, the man shot John Walter and killed him. For nothing more than being out and about on a February day.
It turns out the shooter, Gerald Declan Radford, had targeted John Walter with threats and insults before.
The morning before, he apparently charged up to John Walter and began screaming in his face: "You're going to die, you're going to die."Since then, the gunman has tried to claim "self-defense." In Florida, that could be enough to let him get away with literal murder. The state's "stand your ground" law provides lots of protection for shooters and people who commit homicide, as long as someone claims they killed to protect themselves.
This "stand your ground" law has been used by many perpetrators of murders and hate crimes to evade justice, including in racially-motivated cases involving the murder of BIPOC people.
In this case, state prosecutors are charging the shooter, Gerald Declan Radford, with murder and classifying it as a hate crime.
But reversing Florida's chilling "stand your ground" law is also important in order to ensure bigots aren't able to use this legal loophole to wriggle their way out of murder convictions. Sign the petition to stand with the LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities in Florida and demand the state legislature reverse its "stand your ground" law now!