WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a request for a stay of execution from an Alabama inmate who said the state’s method of execution could subject him to excruciating pain. The court’s last encounter with the case, in April, produced an angry clash among the justices that spilled into public view.

The vote on Thursday was 5 to 4, with the court’s more conservative members in the majority. They offered no reasons for denying the stay.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the dissenting justices, said the court should have put off the execution of the inmate, Christopher Lee Price, long enough for a federal judge to hold a trial, which had been scheduled to start on June 10, to consider whether the state’s execution protocol violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

On Wednesday, Mr. Price’s lawyers urged the Supreme Court to grant a brief delay.

“The evidence heavily favors Mr. Price,” his lawyers wrote. “The state, however, is desperately seeking to prevent federal judicial review of its lethal injection protocol, hoping that Mr. Price’s execution on May 30 will moot his Eighth Amendment claim before the district court is able to issue a ruling on the merits.”

The state’s lawyers responded that Mr. Price had raised his claim too late. “Price avoided his April execution date by gamesmanship,” they wrote. “His delay tactics should not be rewarded.”

Mr. Price was executed on Thursday night, Gov. Kay Ivey said in a statement.

Mr. Price and an accomplice were convicted of using a sword and dagger to kill William Lynn, a minister, in 1991 in his home in Bazemore, Ala., while he was preparing Christmas presents for his grandchildren. The pastor’s wife, Bessie Lynn, was badly wounded in the attack but survived. Mr. Price admitted to participating in robbing the couple but claimed that only his accomplice had harmed them.

In April, the court allowed Mr. Price’s execution to proceed by a 5-to-4 vote. The majority, in a brief, unsigned opinion, said Mr. Price had missed a deadline. Last June, Alabama gave death row inmates 30 days to choose nitrogen hypoxia, which deprives the body of oxygen, as the way they would be executed.

Mr. Price did not make the request in time, but he had since done so. The majority said the missed deadline was the end of the matter.

That opinion prompted an anguished middle-of-the-night dissent from Justice Breyer, whose request that the justices discuss the case the next morning was refused.

“To proceed in this way calls into question the basic principles of fairness that should underlie our criminal justice system,” Justice Breyer wrote. “To proceed in this matter in the middle of the night without giving all members of the court the opportunity for discussion tomorrow morning is, I believe, unfortunate.”

The dispute among the justices lasted long enough that Alabama officials postponed the execution, and Mr. Price remained on death row.

In an unusual after-the-fact opinion issued on May 13, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch, wrote to “set the record straight” about why they had voted to let the execution proceed.

Mr. Price’s strategy was to delay the inevitable, Justice Thomas wrote.

“It is the same strategy adopted by many death-row inmates with an impending execution: bring last-minute claims that will delay the execution, no matter how groundless,” Justice Thomas wrote. “The proper response to this maneuvering is to deny meritless requests expeditiously.”

“To the extent the court’s failure to issue a timely order was attributable to our own dallying,” he wrote, “such delay both rewards gamesmanship and threatens to make last-minute stay applications the norm instead of the exception.”

On Thursday, in a part of the dissent joined only by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Breyer wrote that Mr. Price’s case illuminated problems with the death penalty.

“This case demonstrates once again,” he wrote, “the unfortunate manner in which death sentences are often — perhaps inevitably — carried out in this country. We have here an illustration of why I believe, as I have previously argued, that the court should reconsider the constitutionality of the death penalty in an appropriate case.”

Follow Adam Liptak on Twitter: @adamliptak.

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