The judge gave John D. McGuire the standard plea deal for drunken drivers.

No DWI conviction. Just probation and a fine.

It didn't matter that McGuire had been caught weaving at 100 mph. Or that he had been three times as drunk as the law allows.

He got the deal, even though when he went to accept it — in Town and Country's courtroom — he was drunk again.

When McGuire got into his car to drive away, he got a second DWI in the parking lot.

This time, another judge handled it, and approved another no-conviction deal.

Plea agreements are the rule, not the exception, in the St. Louis area.

A Post-Dispatch investigation has found a culture of cutting deals for DWIs in the area's court systems. Prosecutors and judges here are far more likely than in the rest of the state to let a drunk driver avoid a conviction. Even prior offenders arrested again have an even chance of avoiding another DWI conviction.

Last month, the newspaper reported that police and prosecutors routinely fail to charge persistent drunken drivers with felonies that could send them to prison.

The new findings show another way the St. Louis system is soft on drunken drivers.

The newspaper could study only the Missouri side of the St. Louis area because Illinois officials refused to release meaningful data for analysis. In Missouri, the newspaper found a hodgepodge system that allows more than 100 courtrooms — most of them small, with part-time judges and prosecutors — to handle the majority of DWI cases.

Local judges and prosecutors regularly ignore federal recommendations and practices in other Missouri regions that aim to convict drunken drivers, even first-time offenders, of the crime they committed.

Instead, local courts routinely grant plea bargains that not only keep DWIs off conviction records but often ensure that any aspect of the case is forever sealed from public view.

The system struggles to keep tabs on who's cutting deals with whom as repeat offenders go from court to court. A state law prohibits repeat offenders from getting special deals. Although the law was briefly negated by a court ruling, it also appears to be regularly ignored.

And when drunken drivers on probation get arrested for DWI again, the courts rarely bring them back for more punishment, even though that threat is supposed to be society's insurance policy to keep probationers from driving under the influence.

Benefiting at nearly every turn are people such as McGuire.

MUNICIPAL MAZE

At 2:22 a.m. on Sept. 23, 2007, a Town and Country officer watched an SUV zip by him on Highway 40 (Interstate 64).

The radar gun showed 97 mph. It climbed to 100 mph before the officer could give chase.

The SUV weaved, cut in front of traffic and sped down an exit ramp before it stopped for the officer.

The driver was McGuire, 36, a sales manager from Chesterfield. He told police he'd had three glasses of wine at a business party.

But McGuire failed roadside tests to walk, talk, stand and stare, police said. When the officer tested McGuire's blood-alcohol level at the station, it came back at 0.246 percent — more than three times the legal limit of 0.08.

To be that drunk on wine, someone of McGuire's gender and weight would have had to have had 15 glasses over five hours, according to the University of Missouri's Wellness Resource Center.

McGuire was taken to the station, locked in a holding cell and released later that day on a promise to appear in court.

McGuire could not be reached for comment for this story.

In other states, such as Illinois, municipal courts are reserved for minor cases, such as parking tickets or noise complaints. Anything more serious goes to the state court system, staffed by full-time judges and prosecutors.

But that's not the case in Missouri.

Cities and towns have wide latitude to funnel all but felony crimes into their own municipal courts, where they decide penalties and keep the fines collected.

So most of the area's DWIs are handled by more than 100 municipal courts across the region, where most of the judges and prosecutors are part time and dole out justice on weekday nights.

And that's where the DWI deals are the most lenient.

DEALS, DEALS, DEALS

For every seven people who walk into a municipal court facing a DWI charge, six walk out without any alcohol conviction on their record.

The rate comes from a Post-Dispatch analysis of state court and driving record data, which showed alcohol convictions for only 1,212 of 8,334 area municipal DWI cases recorded from the 2008 fiscal year, the most recent data available.

While it's clear some charges get dismissed for lack of evidence, a review of cases across the region found that the vast majority of arrestees avoid a DWI conviction through one of two plea deals:

— A watered-down charge. A longtime tactic, in which prosecutors drop a DWI charge in favor of a traffic charge with less stigma, such as careless driving or improper lane usage. The lesser conviction is recorded, but not serious enough to cause a license to be revoked.

— The no-conviction conviction. Also known as a suspended imposition of sentence, or SIS, a person admits to driving drunk but is put on probation without technically being convicted. Once the probation is over, the DWI charge is dropped and the case vanishes from public view.

In either deal, the result is the same: The state Department of Revenue — the keeper of driving records — is never told that the person was convicted of DWI or any related alcohol charge. That conviction notice is a trigger for mandatory license suspensions and a warning sign of problem drivers for insurance companies and the public.

Such deals are common in other states, too. In Illinois, court supervision is similar to SIS except for the secrecy.

But advocates for more punishment, along with federal authorities, criticize the deals. In a recent audit of Missouri's DWI enforcement, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration called for the state to avoid either type of deal and to convict drunken drivers of drunken driving.

St. Louis-area officials defend the deals. More than a dozen municipal prosecutors, judges and defense attorneys say insisting on DWI convictions would lead to more trials and clog the courts. Besides, it's simply too harsh to convict a first-time offender of DWI.

A common scenario offered: Picture a family man who had one too many beers at a restaurant before driving home. Should he face the stigma of a DWI conviction for one mistake?

"It's a drastic remedy to give them a conviction if they have had no previous DWIs," said Darold Crotzer, the longtime Clayton municipal court prosecutor who routinely agrees to SIS deals.

"I feel like you could make a mistake once," Crotzer said, "and probably you and I have driven when we shouldn't drive."

But the newspaper found the plea bargains are extended to cases in which the driver caused accidents, fought with police or had prior arrests.

McGuire racked up two more arrests — for weapons and drugs — before his court date for the first DWI.

DRUNK AT COURT

Eleven months after his stop, McGuire showed up with his attorney, Ben Capshaw, for Town and Country's twice-a-month municipal court session.

The city's part-time judge is Dean Waldemer, who by day works as an assistant prosecutor for St. Louis County.

The city's part-time prosecutor is Keith Cheung, a lawyer who also prosecutes municipal cases in four other area cities, is a judge in another, and does some defense work.

The three lawyers agreed to a plea deal giving McGuire an SIS. If McGuire did what he was supposed to do, the case would be erased from public view after two years and his drivers record would stay clean. McGuire agreed to pay $690.50 in fine and court costs. He also agreed to get treatment and not drive drunk again.

But he broke the second promise within minutes.

Town and Country Lt. Stephen Nelke said McGuire smelled of booze, a police report said. In the courtroom, Nelke asked McGuire if he'd been drinking. McGuire admitted he had, but insisted he hadn't driven. McGuire said his girlfriend had dropped him off and would pick him up.

But a security camera caught McGuire walking to his Audi. A police dispatcher sent an officer to stop him.

The officer got there just after McGuire started his car. He was stopped again and tested. He again failed the field tests, police said. This time, he refused the blood-alcohol test.

McGuire was hauled back into the courtroom and brought before the judge again.

Cheung, the prosecutor, remembers he and the judge determining the deal couldn't be altered.

"You can't short-circuit the process at that point," Cheung said.

So McGuire was arrested again for DWI. He was taken to the police station, processed and released.

ANOTHER DEAL

McGuire was now a repeat offender. Prosecutors insist those kinds of drunken drivers get no favors.

Waldemer has said that the special SIS deals are limited to those first-timers who made one mistake.

"Repeat offenders, whether it be here in Town and Country or on the state level, are dealt with much harsher, of course," Waldemer said at a Town and Country aldermanic meeting last year.

Yet repeat offenders often avoid conviction.

An analysis of 2006 DWI arrest data showed that 50 percent of repeat offenders arrested that year avoided a conviction. Compare that with 38 percent in the Kansas City area, and 29 percent in the rest of the state.

The newspaper couldn't determine which local courts were providing the deals to repeat offenders. Both municipal courts and the state court system handle cases of prior offenders arrested again for drunken driving.

McGuire's second DWI charge was sent to the state court system, where Prosecuting Attorney Robert P. McCulloch's office handled it.

It's the same place where Waldemer, the part-time judge, has his day job, although records show he didn't handle the second case. (Waldemer said ethics rules bar him from commenting on any aspect of McGuire's cases.)

Even though McGuire's second DWI came in a parking lot minutes after promising to stay sober, McCulloch's office agreed to give McGuire another SIS. This time, he was given three months in jail. There was no fine.

The deal today would violate state law, but at the time, the state Supreme Court had ruled that an SIS from a municipal court DWI case could not be used as a prior offense.

McCulloch said his office decided that the best way to handle McGuire was to ensure that he got treatment for alcohol abuse. "We take a calculated risk every time we recommend this sentence," McCulloch said, but in most cases defendants get the treatment and don't have further incidents.

Lawmakers have since reversed the court and now prior offenders are again ineligible for an SIS.

It's unclear how often that law is broken — the courts don't keep or share enough data with the public to compute it.

Tim Kelly, a judge in Florissant, said Missouri laws are contradictory, and he and other judges do not think the SIS law pertains to them. Judges, he said, have the right to use their discretion in disposing of cases.

The best available data, from a highway patrol database, show at least 44 people arrested in 2008 on repeat DWI charges who ended up getting the SIS deal.

But there could be many more.

That tally counts only people originally charged as repeat offenders. Many times, prosecutors will charge a repeat offender as a first-timer, making those cases impossible to track.

Peter Joy, a Washington University law professor, said he believes that when courts give someone a second SIS, it's usually by accident: One court doesn't know another court already gave a defendant an SIS for an earlier DWI.

But Joy suspects that, sometimes, prosecutors knowingly ignore the law to speed up plea deals.

To Joy, that's "much more problematic from a public safety perspective."

PROBATION VIOLATIONS IGNORED

Capshaw, McGuire's attorney, insisted that the courts were not lenient, because of one element of the deal unusual for a second-timer.

McGuire had to attend a three-month treatment program in the county jail called Choices.

He was released on probation and — just as with his first case — required to avoid alcohol and arrest for two years.

McGuire made it six weeks.

A 911 caller on Feb. 13 saw McGuire stumble out of a steakhouse, fumble for minutes trying to start his car, and then drive to a gas station. McGuire told police he had had three glasses of wine. He failed the roadside tests, begged to be let go and refused to take a blood-alcohol test, according to a police report.

He was released — charges commonly take a month or more to be issued. But authorities could have done something immediately to punish McGuire.

Because he was on probation for the first two DWIs, he was beholden to the courts to avoid being arrested. The courts had the power to revoke his probation and impose a harsher sentence for the first two cases.

But it took three months for the county department overseeing his second probation to tell the court of the new arrest, and a month for the court to issue a warrant for his arrest.

By the time the court issued the warrant, McGuire had been arrested for two more DWIs. He skipped court on those charges, so more warrants were issued.

Secrecy rules and incomplete data make it impossible to say how often probationers such as McGuire avoid more punishment for new arrests. But in reviewing the criminal histories of 10 chronic offenders, the Post-Dispatch found 18 arrests that could have qualified for probation revocations, and only four resulted in revocations.

Municipal courts were the most lenient, where probation supervision was often limited to ensuring fines were paid and — maybe — checking for new arrests just before the two-year probation expired.

Still, some judges insist they are tough on probation violators. Among them is Waldemer.

When Town and Country aldermen were mulling whether to reappoint him as municipal judge last year, he stressed that the court's leniency toward first-time offenders didn't extend to people arrested again.

"If you do violate while you're on probation, you do get a conviction right away," he said

But that wasn't true in McGuire's case.

Just four months earlier, the judge had seen McGuire violate his probation deal within minutes. It took less than a day for the county prosecutor to file a charge on that DWI.

Legal experts say that once the new charge was filed, the Town and Country prosecutor could have asked that McGuire's probation be revoked and he be convicted of DWI. Had he been convicted, McGuire's three more recent DWIs could have been charged as felonies.

Instead, nothing was done as McGuire continued to violate his probation with his third, fourth and fifth arrests.

Cheung said that wasn't a surprise, because municipal courts aren't automatically notified if someone on probation is arrested again. Clerks must check manually, and commonly have time to do so only toward the end of a defendant's probation.

Only last month did Town and Country's prosecutor formally ask for McGuire's probation to be revoked for being rearrested.

The filing came 391 days after the DWI in the parking lot — and because, Cheung said, the Post-Dispatch asked to see McGuire's file.

In hindsight, Cheung said, the court should have revoked the probation immediately after the parking lot arrest.

"That night, it was probably an oversight," he said. "If everyone was thinking, we should have violated his probation then and there."

Waldemer ordered McGuire to show up Oct. 1 at Town and Country's municipal court to explain himself.

He was a no-show. Now he could face a new arrest warrant this week.

In the meantime, his record remains free of DWI convictions.