A federal judge has scheduled arguments for Thursday on a motion by a reputed Ku Klux Klansman accused in the 1964 slayings of two black men to have the charges dismissed.

U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate has scheduled the hearing for 8:30 a.m. Thursday at the federal courthouse in Jackson.

James Ford Seale has pleaded not guilty to two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy. The 71-year-old Seale is being held without bond in the Madison County jail.

Seale could be sentenced to up to life in prison if convicted in the deaths of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee.

Prosecutors say Moore and Dee were seized and beaten by klansmen, then thrown into the Mississippi River to drown.

Seale and reputed KKK member Charles Marcus Edwards were arrested in 1964.

The FBI, consumed by the search for three civil rights workers who had disappeared that summer, turned the case over to local authorities, who promptly threw out all charges. The Justice Department reopened the case in 2000.