Lethal Injection Debate: Oklahoma, Florida Seek To Lift Execution Stay As Supreme Court Allows Midazolam

Attorney generals in Oklahoma and Florida on Monday asked their supreme courts to once again allow executions in their states, hours after the U.S. Supreme Court authorized the use of a controversial drug that was responsible for botched executions in several states.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that midazolam -- a drug used by Oklahoma and three other states to put inmates to death by lethal injection -- does not violate the U.S. Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Justice Samuel Alito argued that opponents of midazolam failed to identify an alternative method of execution to lower risk of pain, NBC News reported.

In a notice sent to the state Court of Criminal Appeals, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt requested that inmates Richard Eugene Glossip, John Marion Grant and Benjamin Robert Cole may be executed as early as Aug. 5, the Associated Press reported. "The families in these three cases have waited a combined 48 years for justice," Pruitt reportedly said, in a statement.

Courts across various states had issued a stay order on executions amid the debate on the use of midazolam in a three-drug combination following executions that went awry in Arizona, Florida, Ohio and Oklahoma. Oklahoma death row inmates argued in April that midazolam cause intolerable pain and takes longer than usual to put the inmates to death.

According to the Tampa Tribune, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi asked the state's Supreme Court to proceed with the execution of Jerry Correll who killed his ex-wife, daughter and two other people in 1985 in Orlando. He was scheduled to be executed on Feb. 26.