WhatFinger


Hysteria became Lee's get out of jail free card. Hysteria that was probably avoidable if the government had made the least effort to clear up media-promoted misconceptions.

Making a Killing off a Killing



Ready to have your mind blown over the latest episode of "Villain as Victim" or "The American Way of Litigation?" Eight years ago, Koua Fong Lee sped down a St. Paul, Minn., freeway off-ramp going as much as 90 miles an hour in his Toyota. He slammed into an Oldsmobile driven by Javis Trice-Adams Sr., who was waiting at a red light. The driver and his 9-year-old son died at the scene. His 6-year-old niece, Devyn Bolton, was paralyzed and later died. Two other passengers in the Oldsmobile were seriously injured.
And now a jury has awarded him $750,000 for it. Other persons in his vehicle received substantial awards, as well. Lee, an inexperienced driver who presumably hit the accelerator instead of the brakes, was convicted of criminal vehicular manslaughter and sentenced to eight years in prison. But ultimately he served only 2½. He was sprung during the 2010-2011 hysteria over "sudden unanticipated acceleration" in Toyotas. His lawyers used the mania to get a judge to order a new trial and prosecutors, eyeing a media nightmare, opted to just let him go. Whereupon the national media anointed him a hero/victim. Never mind that as I wrote in numerous articles at the time and recently in an exhaustive piece in the Skeptical Inquirer, there's no evidence that any Toyota ever suffered sudden acceleration. That is, other than an incident involving a loaner Lexus that had a floor mat intended for another vehicle. It was both thicker than it should have been and couldn't be tacked down. It slid below the accelerator, jamming the throttle open. The driver panicked and didn't brake, didn't push the "off" button, didn't go into neutral. All the occupants died. That's what two intrepid and dishonest reporters at the Los Angeles Times turned into nationwide panic, nearly winning the Pulitzer Prize for it.

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There were no deaths or injuries from sticky pedals, "ghosts in the engine" or demons as one driver indicated in congressional testimony. Not even that old stand-by gremlins. Independent investigations by both the National Highway Traffics and Safety Administration (NHTSA) and NASA found nothing wrong with the electronics--as had been almost universally claimed. Indeed, the Justice Department's $1.2 billion record fine against the company last March included no allegations of any such problems. Rather Toyota was slammed for lack of cooperation--the equivalent of the "witch" protesting while being led to the stake. Further Lee's car, a 1996 Camry, wasn't even among the alleged faulty Toyotas, the oldest of which was model year 1998. And the evidence at trial couldn't have been more damning.

GUILTY AS CHARGED

Lee claimed he was "stepping on the brakes as hard as possible," but mechanical engineers examined the car on behalf of both the state and the defense--and, according to the prosecutor, both found the brakes were operating and there were no problems with the accelerator. Plus, there were no skid marks. None. His lawyers had an "expert witness" testify that was because Lee's Camry had anti-lock brakes. In fact, anti-lock brakes merely reduce the length of the marks by about a tenth. Further, brakes always override the accelerator. Always. Including in a test on a V6 Camry. My own experience in a 1993 accident is enough to have kept him in jail and have the suit dismissed. My car containing my future wife and I, coincidentally in a Toyota, fishtailed on Pacific Coast Highway cliff in 1993 and rifled off the cliff. As the accompanying photo shows, my braking left skid marks all the way to the precipice. Toyota's counsel should show similar photos to jurors until the judge orders him to stop. (With us, Toyota settled and fixed the fishtailing problem in the next model year--which I promptly bought.) They also rounded up testimony from 10 other people who claimed to have had runaway experiences in a 1996 Camry. But that proves nothing--because such complaints were prompted by the hysteria. I found more than 2,000 sudden-acceleration complaints for 1996-model vehicles in the NHTSA records at the time. Yet only 86 concerned any Toyota. That was versus 294 for the Dodge Caravan alone. Nobody claimed Dodge Caravans had sliding floor mats, sticky throttles, or required exorcism.

WE'RE FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND ARE HERE TO TERRIFY YOU

No matter: Hysteria became Lee's get out of jail free card. Hysteria that was probably avoidable if the government had made the least effort to clear up media-promoted misconceptions. For starters, as I reported in Forbes, it should have explained that its so-called "complaint database" allows anybody to enter anything they want about any vehicle. For example, it includes an entry submitted by "Damnable Liar" that relates a vehicle that, due to a child-seat problem, accelerated to 999 mph and went to the moon. That was my submission. NHTSA played to the media by regularly "reporting" the number of deaths allegedly linked to Toyota sudden-acceleration, as many as 105 depending on the source, without pointing out that many death claims are plainly absurd. Ten deaths, for example, were originally blamed on other aspects of the cars--but later simply changed to unintended acceleration. In one, the driver was charged with being drunk as a skunk when he killed his best friend in a fiery accident. Unlike Lee he did go to jail and serve his time. I even found three death claims in which the accidents never happened. In one, a poor guy was allegedly tugging at his floor mat to release the throttle. But I called the police of the jurisdiction in question and they had no record of it. None of this reality ever trickled down to the mass media. Everyone, including jurors, "knows" that for a brief period Toyotas suddenly went insane. Before just as suddenly returning to normal. Any accident involving a Toyota during that period simply must have been the company's fault. Indeed, Toyota felt compelled to pay $10 million to settle the Lexus case. It's settled numerous others. So it's not surprising that Lee tried to cash in on his killings by alleging that he required psychological counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder because of both the accident and his imprisonment and now requires sleep medication. But bizarrely, the jury reduced Lee's award by 40 percent finding him 40 percent at fault. Even a rabidly anti-Toyota blogger shot holes in that. "It doesn't make sense to hold Koua Fong Lee 40 percent accountable," he wrote. "You can't have it both ways. Either the vehicle had a manufacturing defect in the accelerator assembly or it didn't." Ultimately it seems they didn't really believe his story. But they felt bad for him and his family. Trauma is trauma, even if self-inflicted. Meanwhile the real victims, those in the Oldsmobile, received $11.4 million. That again is all-too-typical jury behavior. They suffered horribly and should be compensated. Nobody else around to do the compensating, so Toyota got the bill. That's the American tort system, not for nothing often compared to playing the lottery. So anybody pointing to Toyota settling cases as proof of its guilt or perceived guilt need only consider what can happen when a company decides to stand its ground. One trusts Toyota has learned its lesson. Don't insist you're not a witch; don't insist there aren't witches; don't struggle on the way to the stake. In fact, be a good citizen and bring your own marshmallows and weenies.


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Michael Fumento -- Bio and Archives

Michael Fumento is a journalist, author, and attorney who specializes in health and science. He can be reached at Fumento[at]gmail.com.


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