Two legislative committees agreed Wednesday to recommend letting state courts continue dismissing drunken driving charges for first-time offenders who complete treatment programs.

Members of the judiciary and transportation interim committees voted unanimously to back extending for another two years the 2004 law that allows courts to take a plea in abeyance on DUI violations.

Without action during the 2006 Legislature, the law will sunset on July 1 of next year.

The Utah Substance Abuse and Anti-Violence Coordinating Council also recommended continuing the law to allow further study of its effectiveness in the council's annual report, released Wednesday.

The council's report focused on drunken driving statistics, including the fact that alcohol-related traffic fatalities have increased from 47 in 2003 to 72 in 2004.

"That's almost 50 percent more than the homicides in the state," said Art Brown, president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. "That is really a devastating crime, and it's a violent crime."

Brown said that MADD opposes allowing pleas in abeyance on DUI cases.

"MADD is not for pleas in abeyance," he told the Deseret Morning News. "The victims have the heaviest burden and the longest sentences, like a lifetime of death and injury. What a dismissed charge says is that the crime doesn't bear the seriousness that it should."

Votes to extend the plea in abeyance law came after committees heard the results of a new study that found nearly 96 percent of DUI offenders given a plea in abeyance in Taylorsville Justice Court successfully completed their ordered treatment.

That's compared to 80 percent of the DUI offenders in Salt Lake City Justice Court, which does not use pleas in abeyance — a guilty plea to a charge that will be dismissed if the conditions of the court are met — in drunken-driving cases.

The findings of the Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice may have more to do with what researchers called the "therapeutic justice" approach to DUI offenders taken by the Taylorsville court.

That approach, similar to that used in a drug court, may or may not require a plea in abeyance to be effective, the study concluded. Extending the law two more years will allow for more research.

"This is a significant carrot," Paul Boyden, director of the Statewide Association of Prosecutors, told the judiciary committee. Offenders who complete a treatment program are generally considered less likely to drive drunk in the future.

Still, Boyden said, some criticize allowing a DUI to be dismissed, believing that undermines public confidence in how drunken driven charges are handled by the court system. "This is a message we shouldn't be giving," he said.