Beyond that, the specific reasons for the wildly disparate sentences are revealing. Serrano got 60 months because he became a snitch and testified against the others. Castro, the gun-supplier, was acquitted. In Judge Weinstein's mind, that acquittal was unquestionably the product of the Government's dreaded taboo - jury nullification. Jury nullification of sentences deemed too harsh is increasingly reflected in refusals to acquit.
Jurors are aware of the huge sentences that result from conviction.
He even attributed the jury's refusal to convict the defendant Molina of using a machine gun during the crime as another example of jury nullification. That left him open to the vagaries of the sentence that the prosecutors demanded - not the sentence that was just or fair. Maybe that's why the statute of justice weeps. For almost six months, apparently hoping the subcommittee would magically go away, Thornburg and the Justice Department were silent. No disciplinary action has been taken in any of the ten cases,' Navarro informed the subcommittee.