Decorator Leo Echegaray, strapped to a gurney and dressed in tangerine prison issue, will be injected with a lethal dose of chemicals as punishment for the rape of his daughter although he continues to protest his innocence.

It will be the first judicial killing in 23 years in Asia's only predominantly Roman Catholic nation as the government takes tough action to address public concern about rampant crime. Prisons across the country went on alert for possible riots as the 38-year-old Echegaray began a hunger strike this week. But his jailors are making sure he will die only according to the script.

Echegaray has a cough but ``the report I got was that he was healthy,'' prison superintendent Gregorio Agaloos said on Tuesday after having the inmate, who has been placed in isolation, undergo amedical test. Echegaray gave up his high-profile legal fight to stay alive on Tuesday as ``no one wants to listen anymore,'' his lawyer Theodore Te said.

There are now 915 prisoners on death row in the Philippines, and 21 must be put to death within the next 18 months. One convict on average has been sent to death row every other day since 1994, and there is some concern that the total is growing exponentially.

A telephone hotline links the suburban Manila death chamber with Malacanang palace, which houses the one person who could grant Echegaray a pardon or commuted sentence. But President Joseph Estrada has already rejected separate appeals from Pope John Paul II, the European Union, Canada and human rights groups. Estrada is an ardent advocate of capital punishment and wants the current law to be expanded to make even falsification of land titles punishable by death. An independent nationwide poll in November found 81-percent backing for capital punishment. The Catholic church makes up the onlyorganised opposition. ``The prevailing temper in society today is outrage, a violent anger triggered by what has been viewed as the frustrations of the need for justice,'' University of The Philippines psychology professor Maria Cecilia Conaco said. But lawyers opposed to the death penalty argue that crime has been decreasing for 10 years, and that it is disturbingly easy for innocent people to be convicted given ``imperfections, weaknesses and problems'' in the judicial system.Critics also allege Estrada is latching onto a popular issue to keep up his high approval ratings.

``He has also fanned public hysteria for the execution, channelling public anger to the doomed man and deflecting it away from his inability to deliver,'' political analyst Amando Doronila charged in the Philippine Inquirer newspaper.

``We now have over 900 convicts on death row. If we execute them one by one, it Would take us three years to kill them all. And by the time we're done with the 900, there will probably be another 1,000inmates on death row,'' warned legislator Roan Libarios.

``Years of daily executions will trivialise human lives and make us accustomed to daily killings.'' Such thoughts do not bother a select group of prison guards and medical attendants, who have been rehearsing their grim role for Friday's event. ``In two minutes it will all be over,'' said one member of the team who played the role of the death convict.