As a young attorney, he helped gain a medical furlough for Gourgen Yanikian, an Armenian immigrant convicted in the 1973 assassination of two Turkish diplomats, and defended Harry M. Sassounian, a Pasadena man found guilty in the fatal 1982 shooting of a Turkish consul.
Yanikian was born in Erzurum in 1895, at the height of the anti-Armenian massacres that had taken hold of the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire.