Sentences Vary Widely From Court to Court : Variations in the data may reflect individual factors in cases and jurisdictions. But clearly, different judges weigh similar crimes differently.

Justice may be blind, but it is hardly uniform in Los Angeles County.

From courthouse to courthouse among the county’s 11 Superior Court branches, The Times found wide variance in the frequency with which defendants are sent to prison and the length of time they are typically ordered to serve.

In Santa Monica and Norwalk, 30% of all defendants studied were sent to prison upon conviction, the lowest ratio in the county. In Lancaster, 54% went to prison, the highest ratio.

Defendants sentenced to prison by judges in Van Nuys received minimum sentences 81% of the time--more than any other courthouse. The median jail term in Van Nuys was 240 days, among the county’s highest.

Judges and attorneys say that such data may be misleading because each case must be weighed on its strengths and weaknesses to determine an appropriate punishment. Part of the difference may also be explained by the variations and severity of crimes prosecuted at each courthouse.

Few, however, dispute the contention that sentence lengths can vary greatly from case to case as well as courthouse to courthouse.

Although the sampling of 1,831 cases studied by The Times was not large enough to definitively compare the sentencing practices of the county’s more than 100 Superior Court jurists assigned to criminal matters, numerous examples were found demonstrating how similar crimes can be treated dissimilarly by different judges.

William T. Madison and Lavell Alonso Wright found themselves at opposite ends of the judicial spectrum when they were sentenced this year in different courtrooms.

Call theirs a tale of two burglars.

Wright was arrested at 2:35 a.m. on May 27, after Los Angeles police received a report of a burglary in progress at a gas station at 1855 Devonshire St. in the San Fernando Valley.

When officers arrived, they saw Wright, 21, inside the station. He ran, was captured and positively identified by a witness who had seen the burglary. He was charged with second degree, or commercial, burglary, punishable by as much as three years in state prison.

Madison was arrested on May 7, at 4 a.m., when police responded to a burglar alarm at J.J. Deli & Mart, a mom-and-pop grocery in the 3700 block of West 6th Street near downtown. The officers spotted Madison, 50, behind the store loading a bag into the back of his 1981 Chevy. He dropped the bag and ran.

Officers found him hiding nearby. They found the store owner’s stereo in the back of Madison’s car and his eyeglasses inside the store, which he apparently entered by breaking out a rear window. Like Wright, Madison was charged with commercial burglary.

Neither man was a stranger to the system, though Madison was more familiar with it. A cocaine addict who blamed his drug habit for his crimes, he had been arrested at least six times for residential and commercial burglaries, records show. He had been sent to prison twice before and to jail on no less than three occasions.

He was, in fact, on probation for burglary at the time of his arrest.

Wright, records showed, also was on probation at the time of his break-in. In 1989, he had received a 120-day jail sentence for car theft. He had deserted probation and a bench warrant had been issued for his arrest before the gas station burglary. His only other brush with the law came in 1988, when he was arrested for urinating in public.

“It appears that efforts to control this defendant in the community will be futile,” a probation officer wrote in a report to the court. The officer recommended that Wright be sent to prison.

Wright and the district attorney’s office reached a negotiated settlement while the case was in Municipal Court. The agreement, known as a “certified plea,” then was submitted to Superior Court Judge John H. Major, who said he did little more than approve the deal:

In exchange for pleading guilty, Wright--who was facing a maximum three-year prison term--was given a 16-month term.

Madison also negotiated his punishment, which was forwarded via certified plea to Superior Court Judge Marsha N. Revel at the downtown Criminal Courts Building.

A probation officer assigned to Madison’s case recommended that Madison, like Wright, be sent to prison. The probation officer described Madison as, “slick, articulate, manipulative and deceptive,” adding that, “over the years he has had the benefit of numerous drug abuse treatment programs, all of which obviously serve no useful purpose other than probably gaining him leniency from the courts.”

Nevertheless, on June 5, Judge Revel sentenced Madison to probation on condition that he first spend a year in a live-in drug treatment program.

“He got a real good deal,” Revel acknowledged. “This could have easily been a state prison sentence--even a high-term sentence. But the case came up by way of a certified plea . . . and unless (the plea bargain) is something that’s so outrageous, you go along with it.”