A federal judge was urged Tuesday to throw out a lawsuit accusing the Virginia Parole Board of denying meaningful consideration to thousands of longtime inmates.

Judge Robert Payne is expected to make a ruling in the coming weeks, said Steve Northup, a Richmond attorney who along with the Legal Aid Justice Center represents 11 inmates who sued the board in February.

The lead plaintiff in the case, Sharon Burnette, is serving a life sentence for killing a Roanoke gas station attendant in 1981.

Advocates have argued for years that inmates convicted before 1995, when Virginia abolished parole, have been categorically denied early release by the parole board, which has one of the lowest grant rates in the nation.

If the lawsuit survives a motion to dismiss, attorneys will seek to expand the case into a class action that would represent about 5,000 inmates convicted before 1995.

The current plaintiffs say they became model inmates, only to be denied parole year after year. The lawsuit claims they were systemically denied release based on the serious nature of their offenses -- to the exclusion of other factors the parole board should have considered, such as their progress toward rehabilitation.

In arguments Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Richmond, Assistant Attorney General Richard Vorhis, who represents the parole board, asked that the lawsuit be dismissed.

Because parole is discretionary, the inmates have no standing to assert a violation of their constitutional right to due process, Vorhis argued.

The state is also contesting arguments that the repeated denials amount to a retroactive abolishment of parole for inmates who were sentenced years ago with an expectation that they would serve only a fraction of their time.

"The parole board's failure to grant early parole release to [the inmates] does not increase the measure of punishment imposed by the Virginia courts and juries," Vorhis wrote in court papers.

The inmates had claimed that the parole board arbitrarily cited the serious nature of their crimes as the sole reason for denying parole. But Payne seemed skeptical of that claim, noting that the lawsuit said that was the reason given in 45 percent of the denials in 2006 and 2007.

That means that more than half of the denials were for other reasons, the judge pointed out. "They're clearly considering something other than the nature of the crime," Payne said.

The Associated Press contributed information to this report.