Texas Getaway Governor Driver Spares

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Governor Perry, longtime head of the nation’s busiest death penalty state, spared an inmate yesterday, hours before he was to have been executed for being a killer’s getaway driver.Mr. Perry issued the commutation order on a parole board’s rare recommendation about seven hours before Kenneth Foster was to have been put to death — the narrowest gap by which he has halted an execution in his more than eight years in office.Yesterday’s vote marked only the second time since Texas resumed carrying out executions in 1982 that the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles endorsed stopping an execution with so little time remaining. And in that 2004 case, Mr. Perry rejected the board’s recommendation and the prisoner, who had been diagnosed as mentally ill, was executed.This time, Mr. Perry agreed with the board’s recommendation that Foster be saved from lethal injection.Foster, 30, learned of yesterday’s board vote during a morning visit with his father. A warden told him of the governor’s commutation about an hour later.“The first thing I did was drop to my knees and say a little prayer,” he said as he was being taken from the Huntsville prison unit where executions are carried out for a return trip to the prison that houses death row. “I owe a lot of people.” Death penalty opponents had launched a p.r. campaign to save Foster because they objected to Texas’s so-called law of parties, a unique statute in which each participant of a capital crime is held equally responsible. In any other state, the person who actually killed another person might be eligible for execution, but the driver or other participants might not be. Foster’s lawyer, Keith Hampton, estimated that at least a dozen other Texas death row inmates have been executed under the same law, including one this year.Mr. Perry, who has fought any attempts to water down Texas’s laws on capital crime, didn’t object to Foster’s execution on those grounds. Instead, he said he opposed trying capital murder defendants together, as Foster and a co-defendant were.“I believe the right and just decision is to commute Foster’s sentence from the death penalty to life imprisonment,” Mr. Perry said in a news release.“I am concerned about Texas law that allowed capital murder defendants to be tried simultaneously, and it is an issue I think the Legislature should examine.”The board had voted 6–1 earlier yesterday to recommend, without stating a reason, that Mr. Perry commute the sentence. Mr. Perry didn’t have to accept the recommendation from the board, whose members the governor appoints. Foster had acknowledged that he and his “knucklehead” friends were up to no good as he drove them around San Antonio in a rental car and robbed at least four people.“It was wrong,” Foster said recently from death row. “I don’t want to downplay that. I was wrong for that. I was too much of a follower. I’m straight up about that.”Foster followed Michael LaHood Jr., and his girlfriend to LaHood’s home about 2 a.m. August 15, 1996. One of Foster’s passengers, Mauriceo Brown, demanded LaHood’s wallet and car keys, then shot him through the eye when the 25-year-old couldn’t produce them.Brown and Foster were tried together. Foster was to have been killed yesterday evening, 13 months after Brown, 31, was strapped to the same death chamber gurney.Foster’s lawyers have argue that statements from two other friends, both now serving life sentences, provide new evidence that supports Foster’s claim that he didn’t know Brown was going to shoot LaHood.Brown testified at trial that he thought LaHood had a gun, so the shooting was self-defense, though authorities found no other weapon near the body.Foster did not testify.“I thought what [Brown] said was good enough,” he said later.Before the commutation, Mike Ramos, among the prosecutors in the trial, said he found Foster’s claims unbelievable.“When you let somebody out of your car with a loaded handgun, what do you expect?” Mr. Ramos said, adding that he was irritated by the publicity effort to spare Foster. Last weekend, a group of Foster supporters picketed outside an Austin church the governor attends. Foster would have been the 24th inmate executed in Texas this year and the third to die in as many days. Five more lethal injections are scheduled for next month, including one next week.

Texas Getaway Governor Driver Spares

Texas Getaway Governor Driver Spares

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