Refuse a breath test in Missouri and lose your license for a year.

It's one of the toughest DWI sanctions in state law. And one of the most ignored.

A Post-Dispatch investigation found that since 2000, area prosecutors have let more than 10,000 drivers keep their licenses despite refusing to take breath tests.

Drivers such as William Downs.

With bloodshot eyes, slurred speech and a string of profanities, he told deputies two years ago that there was "no (expletive) way" he would take a breath test.

Downs admitted to driving drunk. But St. Charles County prosecutors let him keep driving.

Within weeks of the DWI plea deal, a weaving Downs — high on cocaine and marijuana, according to police — slammed into a pickup in mid-Missouri. The crash killed a noted University of Missouri professor of agricultural engineering, Charles Fulhage.

Fulhage's widow, Jane, can't believe prosecutors let Downs legally drive after the deal.

But it happens all the time in St. Louis-area courts. When drivers refuse to take the breath test, the law allows them to appeal the one-year suspensions in civil court. The process is supposed to be separate from any criminal DWI case that comes from the traffic stop.

But most area prosecutors bargain away the suspensions as part of plea deals in the criminal DWI cases. The end result: Defendants admit to driving drunk and don't miss one day of driving.

"It just doesn't make sense," Jane Fulhage said through tears.

REFUSING THE TEST

State data show that a third of people arrested annually for DWI refuse to take an alcohol test.

Authorities could get search warrants to draw blood, but most area prosecutors say that is too cumbersome for all but the most serious cases. So Missouri, like most states, uses another tactic: scaring drivers into thinking they'll lose their licenses for much longer if they don't cooperate.

Under Missouri law, those who cooperate and test above the limit automatically lose their licenses for 90 days. Those who refuse to be tested are supposed to lose their licenses for a year or more.

The suspensions are supposed to occur regardless of any additional punishment a judge may later impose for a DWI conviction.

But tucked into the law is an appeal provision — one that for years has benefited those who refuse the test.

Drivers who take a test and fail can appeal the result to the state Department of Revenue. These administrative hearings are hard to win, so the 90-day suspension usually takes effect.

Drivers who refuse to take the test can appeal directly to civil court, where a judge automatically allows the person to continue driving until the appeal is heard.

When the Department of Revenue sends its own lawyers to civil court to fight appeals, the state wins 90 percent of the cases, and judges reinstate the one-year suspensions.

The state, though, lacks the lawyers to handle most of the 5,000 or so appeals filed in civil court every year across Missouri. So county prosecutors must represent the state.

And that's when DWI arrestees' odds dramatically improve.

Often, if defendants plead guilty to the criminal cases, pay fines and promise to do basic penance, such as community service, prosecutors will let them win the appeals and keep driving.

In essence, prosecutors give up on the appeals, telling a judge that their client, the Department of Revenue, should lose the cases. Judges then order the Department of Revenue to let the defendants keep their licenses.

The practice — called prosecutor "confession" — has become ingrained in the playbooks of many St. Louis-area prosecutors.

The most recent data for metro St. Louis — from July 1, 2008, through June 30, 2009 — show 1,395 suspected drunken drivers were allowed to stay on the road despite refusing to let police test their blood-alcohol levels.

PRACTICE DEFENDED

Area prosecutors say the practice of giving up on suspension appeals has been used for decades to help prosecutors get guilty pleas in cases tough to win without test results proving the drivers were drunk.

Defendants get special plea deals that may require them to do community service and get alcohol addiction screening. They keep DWI convictions off their records and get to continue driving, which helps them keep jobs, pay the bills and stay clean — a key benefit to society, prosecutors say.

Prosecutors in two counties — Franklin and Lincoln — aren't as likely to bargain with people who refuse breath tests. They say it's their job to try to impose the law's one-year suspension. Another prosecutor's office, in St. Louis city, stopped giving up appeals in September after the Post-Dispatch began questioning the practice.

"We had done this for so long, and we've done this because we wanted to be similar" to other area prosecutors' policies, assistant prosecutor Pippa Barrett said. "We changed our mind. We think actually that there's some value to not (giving up) any of them. So we're not."

But other area prosecutors remain committed to the practice.

They stress that they offer the deals only to first-timers, the kind of driver who has avoided run-ins with police in the past and just made one mistake.

"I just want to emphasize," said St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert P. McCulloch, "this is first DWIs with no accidents, no injuries — nothing unusual."

But prosecutors at times stretch the definition of what's usual.

Downs, for example, had been arrested twice for drugs before he got the deal.

Hours after he was released from the St. Charles County jail on his second drug charge in 2007, he got into his pickup and drove back, he said, to complain about an abusive guard.

Deputies saw him weaving and caught up to him at the jail, where they said he slurred his speech and smelled like alcohol and marijuana. They said in their report that he refused to be tested.

Downs was charged with DWI. While his case was pending, he was arrested for assaulting his live-in-girlfriend. She told the court that Downs was also a drug addict who, over 10 days, had taken more than 90 of her prescription pain pills.

Four weeks later, prosecutors did everything they could so Downs could keep his license.

DEAL, THEN DEATH

Downs told a judge in criminal court that he had driven drunk. A DWI conviction would have forced Downs to give up his license for at least 30 days, but prosecutors agreed to give him a special no-conviction sentence. That eliminated one way the Department of Revenue could suspend his license.

The department still could suspend Downs' license for refusing the test during the arrest. But prosecutors took that option away the next day.

Prosecutors, representing the Department of Revenue, told another judge in another courtroom that Downs deserved to win his civil appeal.

Under the plea deal, prosecutors and the judge let Downs drive on his promise to get screened for addiction problems within six months.

There's no record Downs was screened before he rammed his full-size 4x4 pickup into the back of a Ford Ranger three weeks later.

In the hours before the crash, police reports show Downs used drugs before heading west on I-70 from St. Charles.

Witnesses recalled him weaving along I-70, running one car onto the shoulder and sideswiping another before he hit the back of Charles Fulhage's small pickup. It spun down an embankment and ricocheted off a tree before rolling down a deep ditch.

Fulhage died five days later. Downs was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

Interviewed in prison, Downs defended the special deal he got in St. Charles County and said that he had deserved to keep driving. But he also insisted that, had his license been pulled, he wouldn't have driven.

Fulhage's widow said she doubts Downs would have stayed off the road but said she can't believe prosecutors made it so easy for him to remain behind the wheel.

"He wasn't just your backyard barbecue guy who had a few more beers, a one-time offender," Jane Fulhage said. "This guy obviously had a drug problem.

"Three weeks later, he goes out and kills somebody."

DEALS DESPITE RECORDS

Jack Banas, the St. Charles County prosecutor, said police never told his office of the other arrests, so prosecutors made the deal without knowing Downs' complete history.

"Maybe we would have asked for shock (jail) time or a little more done with him," Banas said. "The sad thing about that is, I don't think it would have changed the outcome of what this idiot did."

Despite the tragedy, Banas said, he still supports offering that type of plea deal to nearly all first-time offenders. His county, in the most recent 12-month period studied, offered the deal to 53 percent of drivers who filed appeals.

Those not getting the deal, he said, often were repeat offenders.

"They've been out there. They've had their first break. And they repeated their mistake," Banas said.

It's a common refrain from area prosecutors.

Yet, a Post-Dispatch analysis of licensing and court records found that Jefferson, St. Charles and St. Louis counties gave up on license suspension appeals in nearly 70 cases of repeat offenders arrested in 2007. (The newspaper chose to analyze 2007 arrests because the civil cases can take a year or more to wind through the court system.)

Jefferson County had the highest number of prior offenders getting the deal: 34, or about 11 percent of all repeat offenders who filed an appeal there.

Six of the 34 had been arrested at least twice before for DWI.

Jefferson County's prosecutor, Forrest Wegge, got a no-suspension deal for his own 2003 DWI arrest near Kansas City. He said the county's practice was not based on his personal experience, but was an effort to keep the public safe.

He said that sometimes it was better to try to control a repeat offender's driving habits through a plea deal that imposes special conditions on driving, rather than simply suspending a license, knowing the person will probably drive anyway.

"If revoking someone's license actually prevented further drunk driving incidents, I would not even consider (giving up on) an appeal where the individual had a prior alcohol contact," he said. "Obviously, it is not that simple."

It is simple to the Department of Revenue. It sends a letter to prosecutors reminding them that they are supposed to represent the state, and the state wants the suspensions to stick.

But prosecutors can ignore the state's wishes and keep some repeat offenders legally on the road. And state lawmakers continue to let it happen.

REFORMS SIDETRACKED

The Post-Dispatch found that these deals are one more way the St. Louis area's criminal justice system is soft on drunken drivers.

Over the past two months, the newspaper has reported that authorities routinely fail to charge persistent drunken drivers with felony counts that could imprison them, and that courts commonly accept plea deals to keep drunken driving convictions off the records of most of those arrested, including half of repeat offenders.

After the earlier reports, Gov. Jay Nixon called for reforms.

But even before Nixon's calls, lawmakers had mulled changes in how suspension appeals were handled — then did nothing.

Critics and even some supporters of the no-suspension deal acknowledge the system is broken. Both prosecutors and the Department of Revenue would like the state to take over the legal work on the civil appeals.

Prosecutors are tired of the extra workload. Revenue officials want to ensure suspensions happen.

But on the last day of the most recent legislative session, lawmakers balked at a provision to spend $280,000 a year for more Department of Revenue lawyers to handle the extra caseload. The idea died.

So savvy DWI suspects still know how to play the odds.

In February, the Missouri Highway Patrol stopped a man weaving while exiting I-70 in north St. Louis County.

The trooper said Michael G. Corcoran failed a field sobriety test and refused the breath test.

Corcoran, of St. Ann, bonded out of jail, filed a civil appeal and eventually worked out a no-conviction, no-suspension deal in July with St. Louis County prosecutors. The deal kept a DWI off his record, and he didn't miss a day of driving.

He won't talk about the case, but the four-term state representative — valid license in hand — can drive to Jefferson City to vote on any reforms.