The case was only one of a series of mass trials of the thousands of people arrested following protests and sit-ins organised by supporters of Mohammed Morsi, the deposed president, after the coup last July. Another case, also in Minya, will begin today to try 683 people, including Mohammed Badie, the supreme guide to Mr Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood.
Minya province saw some of the worst unrest in the immediate aftermath of events in Cairo on August 14 last year, when the military and police killed hundreds of people while clearing two sit-ins set up in protest against the coup. Islamist mobs responded by attacking churches, Christian-owned businesses and government buildings. They burned police stations, killing several officers.
The 545 defendants in yesterday's case - not all Brotherhood members - were accused en masse of the murder of a policeman in the town of Matay, incitement to murder, damaging public and private property and stealing government weapons. Sixteen were acquitted.
At the first hearing of the case on Saturday, the judge, Said Youssef, rejected a request by the defence for a postponement to allow the large number of papers involved to be scrutinised, the lawyers said.
Only some of the defendants were in court, with others kept in police cells for the hearing. About 400 are not even in custody, having not been arrested or having gone on the run.
At the hearing yesterday, security blockaded the entrance to the court to prevent anyone, including the lawyers, from entering.
"We were not allowed to attend," one lawyer, Ahmed Shabeeb, said. "The verdict was a personal reaction, a stubborn response to lawyers who applied to remove the judge from the case. The sentence violated all legal rules."
The wife of one of the accused, Ahmed Eid, a lawyer, said he was not even present on the streets on August 14 but that a warrant had been issued for his arrest after he appeared on the defence team of protesters at an earlier hearing.
