Jurors in the Koua Fong Lee trial say the defects in Toyota vehicles that have recently come to light might have made for an interesting twist in the trial, but they aren't willing to concede it would have cleared Lee of the charges against him.

"Yes, if a jury was selected and information like this was known, I think there probably would be some questions and second-guessing," said juror Margaret Race of White Bear Lake. "But a jury only works with the information it is given."

Lee, now 32, was convicted of criminal vehicular homicide by a jury in Ramsey County District Court in a 2006 crash that killed a father and son. Three others were seriously injured, including a 7-year-old who died in October 2007, a few days after Lee was convicted.

Lee is serving an eight-year sentence at the Lino Lakes prison. He has maintained all along that his 1996 Camry uncontrollably picked up speed despite the fact he was stepping on the brake. That is consistent with problems of sudden acceleration that have recently come to light in other Toyota vehicles.

"You have to realize how a jury really works," Race said. "You work with the facts you are given. We were told the brakes worked just fine, and that's the information we worked off of."

"I don't think anyone in the courtroom had any inkling that there might have been an acceleration problem," said Charles Neve, an alternate juror from St. Paul.

One juror, who preferred to keep his anonymity, said he had no qualms about the verdict that was reached but said the new information would have added to the evidence. "Obviously, they would have looked at certain things more." But at the time, "they didn't spot anything that was bad or faulty."

That juror also spoke for many when he said the decision was difficult and very emotional. If we had gone with a lesser offense, it was basically "a slap on the hand. It was almost nothing," he said. "Yet we didn't want him to go to prison [for years]. That was tough."

They were glad that it was the judge who had to mete out the penalty.

"I could never have made the decision as to the consequence," said a juror, who preferred to be identified by her courtroom name of Juror No. 6. "I couldn't have been that person."

Vince Tuss, Anthony Lonetree and Pam Miller contributed to this story.