BOSTON — A judge on Tuesday scheduled a tentative May trial date for former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez in the 2012 drive-by shootings of two men, and his lawyers asked a judge to issue a gag order because of intense media coverage of the murder case.

Hernandez has pleaded not guilty to killing Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado after a random nightclub encounter in Boston.

During a hearing in Suffolk Superior Court, Hernandez’s lawyers asked Judge Jeffrey Locke to issue a gag order prohibiting anyone involved in the case from commenting outside court.

Attorney James Sultan said the defense is concerned that Hernandez can’t get a fair trial because of extensive media coverage of his indictment in the double slayings and another murder case against Hernandez in the 2013 death of semiprofessional football player Odin Lloyd. Lloyd’s body was found in an industrial park near Hernandez’s North Attleborough home.

“I think it’s incumbent upon all of us … to do whatever we can to safeguard Mr. Hernandez’s constitutional right to a fair trial and a jury that has not been poisoned by unfairly prejudicial pretrial publicity,” Sultan said. He argued that a judge in Bristol County, where Hernandez is charged with killing Lloyd, issued a gag order in that case.

Prosecutors opposed the request. Assistant District Attorney Patrick Haggan called a gag order “unreasonable” and “unwarranted,” and said it not the usual practice in Suffolk County.

Haggan said Hernandez’s lawyers were suggesting that “because of his celebrity and his public figure status that Mr. Hernandez should not be held to the rules of this court.”

The judge did not say when he would rule on the gag order.

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