The last time police arrested Waldo Baca for drunken driving, an officer found him passed out cold in his truck by the side of Interstate 25 near Santa Fe.

It took the officer several minutes to rouse him, but even then Baca was too intoxicated to speak, according to a state police report. The officer found a mostly empty bottle of whiskey, an empty whiskey bottle and an empty beer can inside Baca's truck, the report says. Later, after refusing to take sobriety and breath-alcohol tests, Baca told a nurse who was drawing his blood at the hospital that alcohol, marijuana and cocaine would be found in his blood, the report states.

His blood-alcohol level at the time was later determined to have been .24 — three times the legal driving limit, according to a spokeswoman for the Department of Health, which oversees the blood testing.

The arrest — which occurred about 6:30 p.m. June 26 — marked the ninth time in the last 17 years Baca, 40, has been taken into custody by police officers from Santa Fe to Los Lunas for drunken driving, according to court records and statistics kept by the DWI Resource Center in Albuquerque. However, in the eyes of the law, the June arrest will be considered his fourth DWI, which now makes it a felony, according to court records and Baca's lawyer.

That's because two of the five DWI convictions on Baca's record came out of Santa Fe Municipal Court under former Judges Tom Fiorina and Frances Gallegos, who may or may not have followed proper procedures in accepting the guilty pleas. Prosecutors often don't include defendants' prior DWIs from those judges because records are spotty and may not indicate defendants were read their constitutional rights.

Also, two DWI charges against Baca — one in 1992 and one in 2000 — were dismissed by judges, according to court records and DWI Resource Center statistics, which come from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Finally, another DWI charge against him apparently fell through the cracks and was never adjudicated at all.

"He's not alone," said Linda Atkinson, director of the DWI Resource Center. "We have a lot of Waldos out there. They can skirt the system with the help of the system. It's always something I find extremely frustrating."

Baca just doesn't seem to get it, Atkinson said. His continuing pattern of arrests and high blood- or breath-alcohol contents means the punishments he's received over the years — court records indicate he's never spent more than a few months in jail at a time — have not deterred him, she said.

"He has a serious problem with alcohol, number one," she said. "Number two, the sanctions levied against him have not been meaningful enough for him to change his behavior. (Prosecutors and courts) favor and coddle the DWI offender rather than say this is totally unacceptable."

Baca, who remains in the Santa Fe County jail, declined a reporter's request for an interview Tuesday. His lawyer, Tom Clark, said he was only aware of three prior DWI convictions for Baca but declined to comment further.

Law-enforcement officers first arrested Baca for DWI about three weeks after his 23rd birthday in March 1992, according to DWI Resource Center records. He was stopped by a Santa Fe County sheriff's deputy on Airport Road near Tierra Real with a breath-alcohol content of .18. Former Santa Fe County Magistrate Isaac Archuleta dismissed the case in September 1992, according to DWI Resource Center records. Records do not indicate a reason for the dismissal.

Six weeks later, Santa Fe police pulled Baca over on Cerrillos Road after seeing him weaving in traffic lanes, according to a police report. Baca, who had a breath-alcohol content of .22, could not perform field sobriety tests and could not produce a driver's license, the report states. He pleaded guilty in front of Fiorina in May 1992, according to Municipal Court records. Baca was already serving five months in jail at the time for other charges, and Fiorina handed down an unspecified jail term for the DWI concurrent to those charges, according to court records.

Less than a year later — on March 20, 1993 — Santa Fe police arrested him in the 1200 block of Zepol Road for DWI again, according to Municipal Court and DWI Resource Center records. However, no breath- or blood-alcohol content is available for that arrest, and it appears the case was never adjudicated, according to both court and resource-center records. The Municipal Court file for that case is missing, said Sharon Romero, Municipal Court records custodian.

Baca wasn't arrested for DWI again until May 2000, when Albuquerque police pulled him over with a breath-alcohol content of .19, according to court records and DWI Resource Center records. He was initially charged with his third DWI, but later pleaded to his first — an aggravated DWI charge — and was given four days in jail and less than a year of unsupervised probation, according to Albuquerque Metropolitan Court records.

Less than three months later, Los Lunas police arrested him for DWI, but the case was dismissed in November 2000, according to DWI Resource Center records. No other information was available for that arrest.

In February 2001, Los Lunas police again arrested Baca for DWI, according to court records. This time he pleaded guilty to aggravated DWI again — his breath-alcohol content was .17. His sentence in that case is not clear in court records.

Santa Fe police arrested him for DWI again in July 2004, when they found his breath-alcohol content was .19, according to Municipal Court records. He pleaded guilty to aggravated DWI and other charges, and Gallegos sentenced him to three days in jail, six months' home detention and a year of unsupervised probation, according to court records.

In September 2006, a state police officer arrested Baca for aggravated DWI after he drove his car off Interstate 25 and rolled it into a ditch, according to a police report. His breath-alcohol content at the time was .28 — more than three times the legal driving limit, according to DWI Resource Center records. He pleaded guilty to aggravated DWI in February, and state District Court Judge Stephen Pfeffer sentenced him to 90 days in jail and five years of probation.

In March, Baca also pleaded guilty to attempted cocaine trafficking — he was originally charged with trafficking cocaine — and sentenced to three years' probation that would run concurrently with his DWI probation, according to court records. He tested positive for cocaine March 31, then stopped reporting to his probation officer in May and June, and was arrested for his latest DWI on June 26, according to probation reports in his District Court file.

"This officer has given probationer Baca many opportunities to report, but he is not taking his probation or the courts serious," Baca's probation officer, Denise Mendonca, wrote in a June 30 probation report.

Atkinson said she thinks it's time for Baca to go to prison and receive treatment for alcohol addiction.

"He's a menace," she said. "He needs to be taken off the road."

Contact Jason Auslander at 986-3076 or :jauslander@sfnewmexican.com.