Only the jurors know whether they actually acquitted pharmacist Barry Cadden on charges of second-degree murder.

Cadden was at the center of a deadly outbreak of fungal meningitis linked to contaminated steroid injections prepared by his company, the New England Compounding Center. More than 60 people died.

In March, he was convicted of racketeering and mail fraud, but was acquitted on 25 second-degree murder charges, which could have sent him to prison for life.

Except the verdict form suggests jurors were actually divided when they were supposed to be unanimous. And Judge Richard Stearns, who will sentence Cadden in a federal courtroom in Boston on Monday, accepted their verdict without making sure all 12 had agreed.

In the three months since the verdict, Stearns has refused to follow the customary practice of local federal judges to release the identities of the jurors soon after trial.

'A Gigantic Mess'

"It is a gigantic mess," says trial and appellate lawyer and legal writer Harvey Silverglate. "I think that's the technical, legal term I would use to describe it."

Other experts and observers describe what the jurors did as astonishing: Instead of simply checking off "guilty" or "not guilty" on the verdict form, when jurors considered the second-degree murder charges they also wrote how many jurors thought Cadden was guilty and how many thought he was not guilty for each charge.

Nine guilty, three not guilty for some of them. Eight guilty, four not guilty for most of them. That's hardly unanimous as federal verdicts require.

On page 1 of the verdict form, it says a check mark equals "unanimous." As this excerpt shows, however, there are vote tallies next to the individual racketeering acts.

And what the judge did when he saw the verdict form with those numbers was just as astonishing, says NYU Law Professor Stephen Gillers. He's an expert on judicial ethics and law governing trials.

"It was incumbent on the judge recognize immediately that he needed to consult with counsel," Gillers says.

But Judge Stearns did nothing of the sort. In fact, he did not tell the lawyers at all before the verdicts were read.

"The verdict on certain counts was unclear," says Silverglate. "The only way to clarify it was to bring the jurors back in the courtroom and ask them what they meant."

But the judge did not do that either. He simply accepted the verdicts of not guilty.

Yet if the jurors were not unanimous, then they did not have a verdict. And if they did not have a verdict they weren't finished deliberating. If they were hopelessly divided, they did not report it. So, arguably, the judge discharged the jurors before they were done. And it's too late to bring them back.

"The judge obviously must have realized there was a problem," Silverglate says. "He sloughed it off and everyone is living with the consequences."

Hiker and outdoorsman Bill Thomas is one of the 700 people across the country who received a tainted injection and got sick. He says walking 100 yards now causes great pain. He's outraged that the judge "didn't bother to ask the jurors a couple of questions" about what they meant to say.

"He seems more concerned about the jury's discomfort than the fact that hundreds of people are sick and their lives have been changed and dozens of people are dead," Thomas says.

The maximum penalty on the counts for which Cadden was convicted is 20 years. But trying to make the best out of the judge's conduct, prosecutors argue that he should consider jury's tell-all verdict form at sentencing. It shows that the majority of jurors voted guilty on the murder charges, after all, and guilty verdicts would have carried a maximum penalty of life in prison.

So prosecutors are proposing a sentencing standard based on preponderance of evidence, not the trial standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

So even though Cadden was acquitted, he could still be punished as if he had been found guilty.

This too comes as a consequence of Stearns' response when the jurors handed him their seemingly contradictory verdict form. And Stearns' insistence on keeping the jurors' identities a secret has also kept a secret of whether they actually acquitted Cadden.

"The judge's reason or rationalization is quite transparent. I think he doesn't want the press to interview the jurors because it could embarrass the judge," Silverglate says.

'The Presumptive Rule Is Disclosure'

"The obligation of openness exists independent of whether people are going to be applauding the verdict, applauding the process, or criticizing the verdict or criticizing the process," says Robert Bertsche, general counsel to the New England Newspaper and Press Association. "The fundamental principle is that this information belongs to the public so that the public can make independent judgments about how the system is working."

The ruling precedent in the 1st Circuit, which includes Massachusetts, has long been that the identities of the jurors are "presumptively public." By practice, as former federal judge Nancy Gertner explains, the names and the addresses of the jurors have customarily been released seven to 10 days after trial, or sooner.