Another inmate, Ledell Lee, was executed Thursday night after courts rejected his last stay requests. Other executions are scheduled for Monday and Thursday next week.

The inmates were all found guilty of terrible crimes. In a Supreme Court brief, the state denounced requests for stays of execution that it said were “nothing more than an attempt to prevent Arkansas from carrying out petitioners’ execution decades after petitioners brutally took the lives of young mothers, children and men who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The reason for Arkansas’s planned assembly line of executions struck some as unseemly: The state’s supply of midazolam, one of the chemicals in its lethal injection protocol, was about to expire, and it was unsure whether it could get more.

In a brief, Arkansas officials blamed “anti-death-penalty activists” for the shortage, saying they had “a long history of keeping states from obtaining lethal drugs for use in lawful executions by subjecting manufacturers and suppliers to threats and intimidation.”

When the Supreme Court heard arguments in 2015 in its last major death penalty case, Glossip v. Gross, Justice Samuel A. Alito seemed to agree, saying activists had engaged “in what amounts to a guerrilla war against the death penalty.”

The upshot of those efforts, he said, was that “states are reduced to using drugs like” the sedative midazolam, “which give rise to disputes about whether, in fact, every possibility of pain is eliminated.”