FORT WORTH, TEX. ? A Texas jury that recently convicted a man of murder accidentally sentenced him to probation instead of prison by signing the wrong form.

The Tarrant County jury did not disclose the mistake until after it had been dismissed too late to change the sentence, Assistant Dist. Atty. Mitch Poe said.

The Jan. 25 sentencing could have been corrected if a juror had spoken up or if defense attorneys or prosecutors had asked the judge to poll the jurors before they were released.

Poe said he didn’t request the poll because he didn’t have any reason to believe the sentence wasn’t correct.

“Prosecutors don’t poll juries,” Poe said. “Unless I think there is something wrong with the verdict, there is no reason. It makes jurors very uncomfortable. I didn’t see any odd reaction from them.”

Sammy M. Alvarez, 54, was convicted in the June 3 shooting death of Juan Olivas, 24, outside a Fort Worth bar. He also faces charges of attempted capital murder and aggravated assault in the shooting of Mario Lopez, 24, in the same incident.

Jury foreman Kris Kirkland said the jurors wanted to sentence Alvarez to both prison and probation time, not understanding that they could choose only one or the other. They accidentally marked the form indicating probation only.

“As soon as the judge started reading it (the sentence), I looked at the girl next to me and said, ‘Something is not right,'” Kirkland said. “But no one spoke out until afterward, which is when we realized something was wrong. But by then it was too late.”

Kirkland said that after the panel was dismissed, one juror said something to the effect of “I can’t believe we just let a convicted murderer go free. I think I am going to be sick.”

Jurors have made similar mistakes in the past, but in the Alvarez case the jury was dismissed before anyone spoke up.

The jury found that the shooting was an act of sudden passion, which lowered the crime from a first-degree to a second-degree felony. That lowered the punishment range from five-to-99 years or life in prison to two-to-20 years.

The prosecution requested the maximum possible sentence; the defense requested probation.