The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is scheduled to hearing arguments in the case against James Ford Seale, who was serving three life sentences for 2007 kidnapping convictions in the 1964 abductions of two teenagers who were found slain.

Seale, now 73, was convicted in the revived civil rights-era case involving the abductions of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee. The decomposed bodies of the two 19-year-old friends were pulled from a Mississippi River backwater in 1964.

A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit said the statute of limitations had elapsed and acquitted Seale of the decades-old crime, but federal prosecutors asked for a review by the full New Orleans court on Thursday.