DUI study points to young men.

Males in their 20s account for nearly one-third of 2016 Colorado cases.

Men in their 20s accounted for nearly a third of all DUI cases in Colorado in 2016, according to a first-of-its-kind comprehensive report on impaired driving in the state that also found most people charged with DUI are ultimately convicted.

Young men were the largest group of defendants in a state analysis of the 27,000-plus DUI court cases filed across the state in 2016, though the group only represents about 8 percent of the state’s population. Men as a whole represented about three quarters of all cases of driving under the influence.

Analysts also found that more than a third of defendants had a previous DUI conviction.

The report was mandated by a bill the Colorado State Assembly passed in 2017 and comes as the number of deaths on Colorado’s roads continues to rise. State lawmakers tasked the Division of Criminal Justice with publishing an annual report collecting and analyzing data on impaired driving in the state. Analysts pulled data from 27,244 court cases filed statewide that included at least one DUI charge and connected those cases to toxicology tests, if they were completed and could be located.

“There have been other data, in Colorado and other states, that look at arrests and fatalities,” said Patricia Billinger, spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Public Safety. “But this is the first to track offenders from their arrest to the final disposition of their case.”

Some of the report’s findings include:

• Almost 38 percent of defendants charged in 2016 had prior DUI convictions.

• Nearly three quarters of people charged with DUI were men.

• Males in their 20s were the largest group of defendants, representing about a third of the total cases analyzed.

• Men also accounted for almost 90 percent of all felony DUI charges.

• Most of the DUI charges filed were misdemeanors. The vast majority of those cases have since concluded and 88 percent of the people charged in the cases were convicted of at least one DUI count.

• Prosecutors filed 3,157 DUI cases in Arapahoe County in 2016, the highest number for any county in the state. Adams and El Paso counties had the second- and third-highest numbers.

• The highest blood alcohol content recorded in the 2016 cases was 0.464 — almost six times the legal limit.

While the report is broad, it notes increased concern about driving while high since the commercial sale of recreational marijuana was legalized in 2014.