Texas governor spares death row inmate's life
WASHINGTON (AFP) — A Texas man, sentenced to death despite never having killed, was spared a lethal injection Thursday after the governor commuted his sentence hours before an execution that had sparked international outcry.
State governor Rick Perry's decision came after the pardons and paroles board voted 6-1 to recommend that he commute Kenneth Foster's sentence to life in prison. He had faced execution for his complicity in a drug-fueled murder.
"After carefully considering the facts of this case, along with the recommendations from the Board of Pardons and Paroles, I believe the right and just decision is to commute Foster's sentence from the death penalty to life imprisonment," Perry said in a statement six hours before the scheduled execution.
Foster, 30, was arrested in August 1996 with three other young black men, all of whom were said to be high on marijuana, following the deadly shooting of Michael LaHood, 25, in the southern Texan city of San Antonio.
Foster was driving the car being used by his three passengers, including Mauriceo Brown, to rob passers-by. Brown got into an altercation with LaHood, who was white, when he started to follow LaHood's girlfriend.
Shooting LaHood at point-blank range in the face, Brown then returned to the car -- meriting Foster's execution under a Texas law that can impose the death penalty on anybody involved in a crime where a murder occurred.
Foster, who was 19 at the time of the San Antonio crime spree, had been scheduled to die by lethal injection at 2300 GMT on Thursday, at the state's execution unit in Huntsville, 70 miles (112 kilometers) north of Houston.
Brown himself was executed last year. The two other men involved in that night's crimes are serving life behind bars.
Prosecutors had successfully argued that Foster should have known, since his friend was carrying a gun, that it would be used for murder.
Other US states have similar laws for charging accomplices, but only Texas applies it to capital crimes.
"I am concerned about Texas law that allows capital murder defendants to be tried simultaneously, and it is an issue I think the legislature should examine," Perry said in his statement.
The death sentence had raised an outcry from rights groups and other opponents to capital punishment.
"In essence, Kenneth Foster has been sentenced to death for leaving his crystal ball at home," argues Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA.
Others arguing against Foster's execution include Sean-Paul Kelley, a close friend of the victim who says he "hated" Brown and his delinquent gang after LaHood's murder.
"But the execution of a young man who didn't even kill Mike? That's not justice. It's senseless vengeance, a barbarism cloaked in the black robes of justice," Kelley wrote in an online blog last month.
On August 23, Texas killed a convicted murderer by lethal injection in its 400th execution since the US Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.
Since then, Texas has accounted for more than one-third of the total of nearly 1,100 executions carried out nationwide. This year, with other states growing reticent about the death penalty, it will stage nearly two-thirds.
Foster himself, who has an 11-year-old daughter, had appealled to Perry, saying he wanted to "pay for what I did," but that being the driver on the night of the murder was "not a capital crime."
Reflecting on his decade awaiting execution, Foster thanked God "for allowing me to journey through this keeping my sanity and being anointed with a gift to learn, grow, and pass on positivity."
