Council Gadfly Is Sentenced, Gets Warning by Judge : City Hall: Daniel Rosenberg is given three years’ probation, ordered to do 100 hours of community service for disrupting meetings.

LONG BEACH —  A Municipal Court judge put gadfly Daniel Rosenberg on three years’ probation last week and ordered him to do 100 hours of community service for disrupting the City Council.

Rosenberg, 61, was convicted last month of interrupting a March 20 meeting of the City Council.

On Wednesday, Judge John S. Lane warned Rosenberg that he faced going to jail if he violated his probation.

“If you misbehave and you come back to me, I want it distinctly understood that I’m going to put you in jail,” Lane said. “If you behave yourself, you have nothing to fear.”

Misbehaving, said Susan Melton, the assistant city prosecutor who handled the case, means “if he does it again, and just doesn’t shut up, and causes more problems.”

City officials--who have taken to leaving the dais, rolling their eyes and chatting during Rosenberg’s many diatribes--said they are pleased with the sentence.

“I’d take it very seriously if I were him,” said Mayor Ernie Kell, who has sometimes switched off the microphone during Rosenberg’s speeches. “We can’t have people like Mr. Rosenberg completely disrupting public meetings.”

However, local activists feared that the sentence would intimidate others who wish to speak out at public meetings. And they questioned spending $3,000 a day for the three days it took to try the case--a decision city prosecutor John Vander Lans said was Rosenberg’s. Rosenberg refused a pretrial offer that he plead guilty in return for 40 hours of community work.

“The whole thing is ridiculous, when there are so many other kinds of pressing needs and issues,” said Alan Lowenthal, president of Long Beach Area Citizens Involved.

Lowenthal said he felt “sorry” for Rosenberg.

But if Rosenberg is intimidated, he did not show it at Wednesday’s sentencing. Instead of the formal suit he had worn to his trial, he sported a pair of jeans and a worn denim shirt. Embroidered on the shirt were a rainbow, a sun and a gull, which he said represented “freedom and love.”

Rosenberg’s manner was also dramatically different from the oddly timid way in which he comported himself at his trial last month, when his attorney, Jay Glaser, argued that Rosenberg was a “man with a mission to help” the poor and weak.

On Wednesday, Rosenberg was his old scrappy self. He read a defiant seven-page, handwritten speech saying, in part: “This is one of my proudest days in my life. I’m disliked and perhaps even feared and hated.”

Rosenberg said battling a “corrupt political machine” is what has caused his lack of popularity.

And he vowed to keep fighting: “We will not remain silent.”

Rosenberg filed an appeal immediately after the sentencing.

Rosenberg recently put a message on his answering machine asking for donations to what he called the Long Beach Legal Defense Club.

“Slap back,” he says on the machine. “Help disrupt the corrupt. Vote with your dollar. We need your help.”