1999: Eduardo Agbayani, omnishambles execution

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At three in the afternoon this date in 1999, Eduardo Agbayani was put to death by lethal injection in the Philippines.

At that very same moment, President Joseph Estrada — an erratic populist who months ago had presided over the first execution since the Marcos dictatorship — was furiously, unsuccessfully, trying to dial the prison to halt the execution.

Initially intent on the condign punishment of a man who raped his own daughter, Estrada had his mind bent towards mercy by a silver-tongued Catholic bishop. With the lethal drugs imminent, he set about on his mission of grace only to find that the nation’s sovereign placing a life-and-death call runs into the same banal connectivity fails that you and I have trying to ring the motor vehicles department. The Economist described it thus:

According to the bishop, Mr Estrada later said he tried several times to telephone the prison, where the execution procedure had already begun, but he got an engaged or fax tone. Mr Estrada was not in the part of the presidential palace with the telephone linked by direct line to the prison — installed for the very purpose of calling off an execution at the last minute. As the seconds slipped by, an aide was dispatched to call on the direct line.

What happened next is unclear. Witnesses to the execution said that there was knocking on the door of the execution chamber and a voice could be heard, saying, “Hold! Hold!” The aide’s cries, according to an official, were at first thought to be a prank. The president’s spokesman later said that the aide’s call had got through at 12 minutes past three. Mr Agbayani had been pronounced dead a minute earlier.

On this day..

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