The Supreme Court has turned down the plea of Union minister Ajay Mishra Teni for the transfer of appeal proceedings against him in connection with a 22-year-old murder case from Lucknow to Allahabad.

The court also rejected the plea of the deceased’s family, based in Lakhimpur Kheri, for rehearing of the appeal proceedings.

Teni’s son Ashis is in custody for the death of four farmers and a journalist in Lakhimpur Kheri in October last year. The farmers were returning from a protest against the junior home minister’s threat to “fix them in two minutes”, issued in connection with the peasants’ movement against the Centre’s now-repealed farm laws.

In the 2000 murder case, two pleas had been filed — one by the family of the deceased Prabhas Gupta seeking rehearing of the appeal proceedings before Allahabad High Court on the ground of unusual delay and the other by Teni for transfer of the appeal from the Lucknow Bench of the high court to Allahabad in view of the advanced age of Teni’s lawyer.

A Supreme Court bench of Chief Justice U.U. Lalit and Justice Bela M. Trivedi declined to entertain both pleas and asked the high court to stick to the November 11 date fixed by the latter for disposing of the appeal proceedings.

The case relates to the murder of Prabhas, a 24-year-old student leader, at Lakhimpur Kheri in 2000. Teni, who was not an MP at that time, was an accused. He was acquitted in 2004, prompting the state and Prabhas’s family to appeal in the high court.

Although the appeal against the acquittal proceedings was heard by the high court in March 2018, the judgment is yet to be passed. Normally, the maximum time taken by a court to pronounce a judgment is six months. So, Prabhas’s family had sought rehearing of the entire appeal.

While disallowing both pleas, the apex court allowed Teni’s lawyer to appear through videoconferencing with the consent of the high court.

The Supreme Court order said: “SLP (special leave petition)... by the accused (Mishra) takes exception to the administrative order passed by the Chief Justice of the High Court of Judicature at Allahabad rejecting the prayer to transfer Government Appeal No. 1624 of 2004 from Lucknow to Allahabad. The transfer was sought on the ground that the learned Senior Counsel who has to argue the matter at Lucknow was ordinarily based at Allahabad and because of his old age it would not be possible for him to go all the way to Lucknow for arguments.