Sick.

Many guilty criminals continue to profess their innocence even when no one believes them, and often even once they're behind bars.

In the case of Koua Fong Lee, a Laotian immigrant serving eight years in a Minnesota prison for vehicular manslaughter, his unending pleas of innocence might acutally be true.

In June 2006, Lee, 32, was driving a 1996 Toyota Camry home from church - his father, brother, pregnant wife and four-year-old child in the car with him - when, he claims, the accelerator stuck, pushing his speed to 70-90 mph. He blasted through two stop signs before crashing into another car, killing three of its occupants - all members of the same family.

In court, Lee testified that, in addition to the car accelerating on its own, the brakes weren't working.

According to a report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in a follow-up inspection of Lee's car, mechanics found the brakes to be in working order.

The jury did not believe Lee's story, and from 2006 until now he has been locked in a Minnesota prison.




The '96 Toyota Camry was recalled in the 1990's due to a sudden acceleration problem related to the cruise control feature, but this fact was not mentioned at the trial.

Actually, according to Google News, both Toyota and U.S. Transportation officials had known about "unintended acceleration" issues since late 2003.

"There is a terrible wrong here, and there is an innocent man in prison," said Brent Schafer, Lee's lawyer, to ABC News.


I, personally, could not agree more, and although I don't know very much about the laws involved here, common sense is telling me that Toyota owes this guy...something - money, at the very least...a whole lot of money.

How absolutely outrageous for an innocent man with no obvious criminal motives whatsoever to rot in prison for the better part of a decade! I think it's a disgusting abuse and failure of our judicial system.

I very much hope the media blows this up so enormously that Toyota can't hide from it.

I'm doing my part right now, and I hope that, if you have a blog or a Twitter account, you'll go there now and do yours.