Sex trafficker's attorney offers to play Elvis Presley song at sentencing hearing

​It was bound to happen some day. Someone would try to use Elvis Presley's song, "In the Ghetto," in a plea for leniency in criminal court. I didn't expect it to happen in Montana, but I was forgetting about Missoula.

A sex trafficker's attorney said at his sentencing:

“We have this poor kid who didn’t have a chance from the get-go,” Hoovestal said.

He also suggested that the verdict for his client, who is African American, may have been different had it been held in Chicago and had the jury been more ethnically diverse. At one point, Hoovestal offered to play a recording of the Elvis Presley song “In the Ghetto” for the court, which Watters declined to hear.

​Source: "Missoula man gets 30 years for trafficking several people, including minors, for sex," by Sam Wilson, Billings Gazette, June 21, 2018.