Rose Parade protester fights charge
By Joe Piasecki 02/07/2008
Andrew Koenig, the actor and human rights activist who was arrested New Year’s Day while protesting a controversial Rose Parade float, pled not guilty Monday in Pasadena Superior Court to a charge that he illegally crossed the parade route.
The charge, reduced from a misdemeanor of interfering with the parade to an infraction, carries a maximum penalty of $100.
He returns to court on March 3.
Koenig is represented by attorney and former Pasadena Mayor Bill Paparian.
Paparian was among human rights activists decrying the presence of the China-themed float — which promoted this year’s summer Olympics in Beijing — as a propaganda tool to gloss over that nation’s persecution of journalists, political dissidents and religious groups.
Koenig played Richard “Boner” Stabone on TV’s “Growing Pains” and is the son of Walter Koening, “Star Trek’s” Lt. Pavel Checkov.
The younger Koenig, who briefly walked in front of the float holding a sign that read “China: Free Burma,” traveled with his father last summer to visit refugee camps housing people who were displaced by conflict fueled by Chinese arms sales to Burma.
“The elected president of Burma, who has never been allowed to assume authority and remains under house arrest by the military government, was once asked what people outside of Burma could do to help their cause. Her response was, ‘Use your freedom to promote ours.’ So that’s what I did,” wrote Koenig in an email to the paper.
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