RP jails brace for riots on execution day
RP jails brace for riots on execution day
MANILA (Agencies): Prisons across the Philippines are on the alert for riots, breakout attempts and other troubles on Friday when convicted rapist Leo Echegaray becomes the first person to be executed in 23 years.
"We're already on red alert," Gregorio Agaloos, superintendent of the national penitentiary in southern Manila, told local television on Thursday.
The death chamber has been ringed with barbed wire and traffic is being kept outside a one-kilometer radius. Large crowds for and against capital punishment were expected to gather outside the prison from Thursday night.
At other jails, gang activity is being monitored for "the possibility of turbulence or disorder," bureau of jail management and penology director, Themistocles Jamisolamin, said.
Other facilities are on "blue alert", meaning half their personnel are on 24-hour standby "in preparation for any occurrence of incidents," Jamisolamin told DZBB radio.
Inmates' visits by relatives would be curtailed on Friday and guards are on the alert for mass breakout attempts, he added.
Echegaray, a 38 year-old decorator convicted of raping his stepdaughter five times, is scheduled to be put to death on Friday afternoon -- the 101st execution since 1924 but the first since 1976 and the first using an injection of lethal drugs.
Eight others among the 915-strong death row population are lined up for a lethal injection this year.
Echegaray had previously been scheduled to die on Jan. 4. But it was suspended by the Supreme Court three hours before the injection was due to be given, because of reported attempts to review the 1994 law that reintroduced the death penalty.
When Congress passed a motion saying there would be no review, the court said the execution was on again.
President Joseph Estrada, reaffirming his rejection of calls for mercy, cut his telephone hotline to the death chamber to deny Echegaray any chance of a last-minute reprieve.
A firm believer in capital punishment as a deterrent, Estrada told reporters he advised the prisons chief Pedro Sistoza "not to expect phone calls from me. They don't have to wait for any call."
He has rejected separate appeals from the Vatican, the European Union, Canada and Amnesty International, the London- based civil rights monitor.
Archbishop Oscar Cruz, president of the country's organization of Roman Catholic bishops, also rejected calls for them to appeal to Pope John Paul II to intercede.
Echegaray's wife, carrying a pink rose in her hand, visited him for a final time in prison on Thursday.
Prison officials said Echegaray's wife, Zenaida, fainted as they parted on Thursday and was taken to the prison hospital to recover.
More than a hundred Catholic nuns, priests and others wearing black masks and nooses around their necks marched on Thursday to the presidential palace asking that the execution be called off.
Echegaray's wife told The Associated Press that he said he was "upset that the president has a heart like a stone, but he will continue to pray that up to the last minute God will soften the president's heart and save him."
A church official said he delivered a handwritten letter on Wednesday from Echegaray to Manila's influential archbishop, Jaime Cardinal Sin, claiming innocence and asking the cardinal to help save his life.
"What if the truth comes out and I'm already dead?" Echegaray wrote in the letter.
Churches throughout the Philippines, Asia's only predominately Catholic country, have been instructed to peal their bells at 3 p.m. Friday, the time of Echegaray's scheduled execution at a special death chamber outside the prison walls.
A prayer vigil is also scheduled at a nearby chapel.