An Edmonds man who was charged with assault and jailed after he confronted two supporters of Lyndon LaRouche over their Obama-as-Hitler poster in September, pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct on Wednesday.
By Lynn Thompson
Seattle Times Snohomish County reporter
An Edmonds man who was charged with assault and jailed after he confronted two supporters of Lyndon LaRouche over their Obama-as-Hitler poster in September, pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct on Wednesday.
Henry Gasparian, 71, who witnessed the horrors of Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union as a child, and lost a brother and two uncles to the war, agreed to a deferred sentence in Edmonds Municipal Court.
Under the terms of the plea agreement, the case will be dismissed after one year if Gasparian has no further criminal charges, said his lawyer Mike Noah, of Puyallup. Noah volunteered to represent Gasparian after reading an account of his arrest in The Seattle Times.
Gasparian also agreed to pay a $400 fine.
His arrest coincided with the increasingly polarized national debate over health care and attracted widespread media attention and debate over the civility of public discourse and the limits of free speech.
An Armenian immigrant and retired salesman, Gasparian appeared on many radio and TV news broadcasts and said he received letters of support from around the world.
He said he was deeply offended by the association of Obama with Hitler when he approached two Lyndon LaRouche campaign workers at the Edmonds Farmers Market and tried to grab their political literature. The two activists said he grabbed one of their wrists and pushed them repeatedly.
In accepting the plea agreement, Edmonds Municipal Court Judge Douglas Fair told Gasparian that while the Hitler image may have been upsetting, the U.S. Constitution protects even objectionable political speech.
After the court hearing, Gasparian said he still believed he had "done right" in challenging the two LaRouche supporters but was persuaded that a jury could find him guilty of two counts of assault, the original charges against him.
He said he also did not want to raise the memories of his parents, who withstood the hardships of the Nazi occupation, or of the relatives who had died, before a jury of strangers "who might not care who Hitler was."
"I think I did the right thing, but maybe I should not have been so physical," Gasparian said.
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