Baltimore's police commissioner and nearly 50 of his officers packed a city courtroom yesterday, successfully imploring a judge to reject the plea for freedom of a former Black Panther member convicted of killing a city patrolman nearly 33 years ago.

Jack Ivory Johnson Jr., 53, who with two other Black Panther members ambushed and repeatedly shot Donald T. Sager as he sat in his patrol car on a West Baltimore street in 1970, argued yesterday that more than three decades in prison have changed him. He told Circuit Judge John M. Glynn that he was sorry for what he had done.

"To the family members of the victims, what can I say?" said Johnson, who had been granted a new sentencing hearing last summer because of a technical error during his original hearing more than 30 years ago. "I am remorseful, but what else can I say. As a human being, I am sorry. I don't feel anyone should be without a father."

When Sager was killed, his son David was 7. That fact and others were among the details considered by Glynn, who decided yesterday that the best way to preserve justice was to impose a new sentence identical to the one Johnson got in June 1972 - life plus 15 years.

His decision came despite pleas from Johnson's lawyer and a prisoner advocacy group, who described Johnson as a model prisoner who has paid for his crime.

"I know you've done the best to be an honorable citizen inside the institution," Glynn told Johnson. "But I always come back to one central question: What happened in April 1970 ... I think the sentence imposed in 1972 is the correct sentence."

Johnson, who showed no emotion as Glynn announced his ruling, was 21 when he and the other Black Panther members fatally shot Sager, 35, and wounded another officer, Sgt. Stanley Sierakowski, as they were writing a report in the 1200 block of Myrtle Ave. Sierakowski was severely injured but survived; he died in 1996.

In a statement to police after his arrest, Johnson said he fired two gunshots in the air while his accomplices, James E. Powell and Marshall Edward Conway, riddled the patrol car with bullets as part of an execution ordered by the Black Panther Party. Johnson told a detective he didn't fire into the car because "I didn't have the heart to kill the pig," according to testimony from the original trial.

Powell and Conway are both serving life sentences in Maryland prisons.

City police turned out in force yesterday to let the judge know that the crime hasn't been forgotten - and that releasing Johnson would send the wrong message. Baltimore Police Commissioner Edward T. Norris and City Fraternal Order of Police President Gary McLhinney led a brigade of police officers into a courtroom that became so crowded that the judge allowed people to sit in the jury box.

"These people go out there and do this job and risk their lives to protect all of us," McLhinney said of the city's police officers. "If we can't protect them ... then I don't know how we can ask them to continue going out there and do their job."

Norris said he remembers his father, a former New York City police officer, bringing home Black Panther Party coloring books that showed children gunning down police in the streets.

"I remember as a little boy begging my father not to go to work," Norris said.

He told Glynn that a sentence reduction would send a "chilling message" to the more than 3,300 Baltimore officers who "risk their lives in the second-most-dangerous city in America."

Among courtroom observers were Johnson's father, who is 83 and in failing health, his sister, two nephews and an aunt who drove from Chicago to attend.

Relatives of Sager and Sierakowski were absent but said through Assistant State's Attorney Mark P. Cohen that they opposed any sentence reduction.

"We're real pleased with the way everything turned out," Cohen said after the judge's ruling. "This was the appropriate sentence in 1972 and it's the appropriate sentence in 2002. No matter what year it is, when you execute a police officer and wound another, a life sentence is the appropriate sentence and no part of that sentence should be suspended."

Johnson was granted a resentencing hearing in July after his attorney, Fred Warren Bennett, successfully argued that the judge who sentenced Johnson, former Baltimore Mayor J. Harold Grady, erred when he failed to say that he had the discretion to suspend part of Johnson's life sentence. Bennett also argued that twice during sentencing, Johnson's attorney said the judge could not reduce the life sentence, and Grady never corrected him.

Yesterday, Johnson talked publicly for the first time about the murder of Sager and the shooting of Sierakowski.

He read from a prepared statement, saying he was too nervous to talk "off the cuff."

"In the 32 years, with the exception of two interviews with prison psychologists, I haven't really spoken about the crimes that resulted in my going to prison," Johnson said. "I have spent more than 60 percent of my life in prison."

Since his imprisonment, Johnson has earned a high school equivalency diploma and a bachelor's degree from Coppin State College. Pretrial release officials wrote that he has been a model prisoner, participating in a work-release program from 1989 to 1993 without incident.

Before the sentence, Bennett asked Glynn to free his client, saying Johnson was a young man at the time of the ambush and wasn't the trigger man.