opinion

Commentary

After his acquittal on flimsy corruption charges, former Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan famously asked, "Which office do I go to get my reputation back?"

The Toyota Motor Co. and local attorney Tracy Eichhorn-Hicks must be asking the same thing right about now.

After 10 months of study, none other than the feds themselves have exonerated Toyota for its so-called electronic throttle malfunction, the subject of worldwide media attention and a litany of lawsuits.

"We enlisted the best and the brightest engineers to study Toyota's electronics systems," is how Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood put it, "and the verdict is in. There is no electronic-based cause for unintended acceleration in Toyotas."

The official findings (made with the help of NASA engineers) essentially confirm earlier analysis done by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, along with Toyota's own exhaustive investigations.

And not unlike the false Audi scare of the mid-1980s, investigators found the most common problem with runaway vehicles to be something euphemistically referred to as "pedal misapplication."

Translation: driver error. Indeed, of the 3,000 complaints involving Toyota, the Traffic Safety Administration had been able to confirm just five.

All of this comes a bit late for an automaker that has been the target of a feeding frenzy due in part to uncritical reporting of two high-profile incidents.

The first involved the incorrect installation of an after-market floor mat in a loaner car. When the pedal got lodged, it tragically resulted in four deaths that made headlines across the country.

The second, even more egregious, came from an opportunistic debtor whose Prius allegedly sped out of control because of Toyota's "sticky pedal." However, subsequent attempts by federal investigators to replicate the incident on the very same car repeatedly failed.

No matter: Toyota not only issued massive recalls on unsecured floor mats, as well as mechanical peddles that sprang back too slowly, but also paid a $49 million fine.

The electronic throttle malfunction theory, however, was always considered the mother lode.

 As one enterprising attorney put it, if Toyota were unable to disprove a "ghost in the machine," it would open the automaker up to billions in damages. Especially if the plaintiffs' bar could find a sympathetic poster child as an example of Toyota's malfeasance.

St. Paul's Koua Fong Lee fit the bill nicely.

In June 2006, Lee was at the wheel of a 1996 Camry when it slammed into the back of another car at the top of an Interstate 94 off-ramp. His car was reportedly traveling between 76 to 91 miles per hour; three occupants in the other car died.

Lee was convicted of vehicular homicide and sentenced to eight years in prison by District Judge Joanne Smith.

But in an amazing turn of events directly attributable to Toyota's negative publicity, the judge last summer ordered a retrial based on "new evidence."

Not to be outdone, then-Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner one-upped her by dropping the case. Lee was free.

Yet "new evidence" in the form of bad press and anecdotes from other drivers is hardly probative in a court of law.

The vested interests needed more to avoid a potential backlash, so they decided to hang Lee's original counsel, Eichhorn-Hicks, out to dry by alleging that a new trial was necessary due to his inadequate representation the first time around.

Eichhorn-Hicks, with more than 30 years of experience, hadn't sufficiently inspected the Camry for defects -- at least according to Lee's new legal team, which included a high-powered Texas law firm.

In fact, Lee's insurance company (with every incentive to blame Toyota) had already done an inspection and wound up settling because it apparently could find no fault with the vehicle.

Because the floor mat was never an issue in the case and the '96 Camry had no electronic throttle control, the only issue left for the defense was a mechanically stuck gas pedal. But that, too, was problematic -- notwithstanding Lee's insistence that he had his foot on the brake.

If Lee were traveling 55 mph and the pedal were stuck or failed to spring back, how did the car actually accelerate, reaching speeds of 80 to 90 mph after climbing an off-ramp just before impact?

Car and Driver would check out the very same model and write that "with the Camry's throttle pinned while going 70 mph, the brakes easily overcame all 268 horsepower straining against them and stopped the car in 190 feet ... just 16 feet longer than with the Camry's throttle closed."

The fact is, Lee's defenses were limited and, as Eichhorn-Hicks told me, "we had to go to trial with something, and a careless driving defense, with a light sentence, made the most sense."

By most accounts, Koua Fong Lee is an upstanding father who was driving his family from church on the day of the crash.

It's obvious the accident was not the result of any conscious indifference on his part. Justice in the case may not have been served by having Lee remain in prison for the full eight years.

But then why did Judge Smith throw the book at him in the first place, handing down a sentence usually reserved for drunken driving fatalities?

And the civil litigator from Texas who became pro bono co-counsel in Lee's fight for a new trial? He would go on to represent Lee in a lawsuit seeking damages from Toyota.

But the most disturbing question may be whether Minnesota's criminal-justice system was compromised on the basis of bad publicity over Toyota's electronic throttle controls that a) had no real bearing on the case in question, and b) now appears to be false.

Jason Lewis is a nationally syndicated talk-show host based in Minneapolis-St. Paul and is the author of "Power Divided is Power Checked: The Argument for States' Rights" from Bascom Hill Publishing. He can be heard locally from 5 to 8 p.m. weeknights on KTLK Radio, 100.3-FM.