For the first time during his tenure, Texas Gov. Rick Perry commuted the death sentence of a condemned inmate, Kenneth Foster, who was scheduled to die Thursday night for driving his friends from the scene of a fatal robbery in 1996.

The rare reprieve for Foster, 30, halted what was to be the third execution this week in Texas.

Texas has executed 21 inmates in 2007, more than any other state. Last week, the state executed its 400th inmate since the death penalty was reinstated in 1982.

Gov. Perry signed the papers making the commutation official less than two hours after the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole voted 6 to 1 in favor of a recommendation of clemency.

"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 message posted on his Web site.

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Foster's wife and relatives, who learned of the reprieve as they waited outside the Huntsville facility where condemned inmates are housed in their final days, said they expected him to be transferred to another unit as soon as possible.

"I'm floating somewhere in between heaven and earth right now," said Foster's wife, Tasha Narez-Foster, a Dutch rapper who met Foster online and married him in June. "It's a huge load off of our shoulders. It's a little bit unreal."

Gov. Perry's decision also marks the second time that a Texas governor has commuted a death sentence, according to Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

The first was under former Gov. George Bush, who commuted the sentence of Henry Lee Lucas, an admitted serial killer who said he wrongly confessed to the murder for which he was sentenced to death.

"That was a case of probable innocence rather than a degree of involvement," Dieter told CourtTVnews.com.

Foster was sentenced to death in 1997 with co-defendant Mauriceo Brown for the shooting death of Michael LaHood, 25, in what prosecutors called a botched robbery.

In the pair's joint trial, prosecutors alleged that LaHood was to be the last target in a string of armed robberies that the group committed in the early morning hours of Aug. 15, 1996.

Foster's case generated controversy because he was sitting in the car, about 80 feet away, when Brown shot LaHood, the son of a prominent San Antonio lawyer, in his driveway.