Gov. Rick Perry accepted a recommendation from the state parole board and said...

Gov. Rick Perry accepted a recommendation from the state parole board and said he would spare condemned prisoner Kenneth Foster from execution and commute his sentence to life. Foster had been scheduled to die tonight. "After carefully considering the facts of this case, along with the recommendation 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. "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 7-member parole board had voted 6-1 to recommend the commutation. Perry did not have to accept the highly unusual recommendation from the board whose members he appoints. Foster's scheduled execution piqued death penalty opponents who criticized his conviction and sentence under Texas' law of parties, which makes non-triggermen equally accountable for the crime. Foster would have joined a number of other condemned prisoners executed under the statute. Foster, now 31, was 19 at the time he played as the getaway driver in the slaying of a 25-year-old man, Michael LaHood Jr. on Aug. 15, 1996. Mauriceo Brown was the actual killer. Brown ran back to Foster's car and they sped away. Less than an hour later, Foster was pulled over for speeding and driving erratically. Foster, Brown, Dwayne Dillard and Julius Steen — all on probation and members of a street gang they called the Hoover 94 Crips — were arrested for LaHood's slaying. Brown and Foster, tried together, were convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. Brown was executed on July 19, 2006. Dillard now is serving life for killing a taxi driver across the street from the Alamo two weeks before LaHood's slaying. Steen testified at Brown's trial and received a life sentence in a plea bargain. Calls from the Council of Europe, from South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former President Jimmy Carter and actress Susan Sarandon to spare the life of Foster had been raised in the past weeks.