[A] lawyer for former state Sen. Norm McAllister, who was found guilty last summer of prostituting a past tenant who worked on his farm, argued before the state’s highest court on Wednesday to overturn that conviction.

Attorney Robert Katims, representing McAllister, told the five-member Vermont Supreme Court that the jury that convicted his client heard little testimony about the prostitution charge during the trial. Most of the court hearing focused on offenses that resulted in acquittals, Katims told the high court.

The jury following a trial last July in Franklin County that acquitted the ex-state senator of charges of sexual assault and a charge of prohibited acts related to prostitution.

He later received a probationary sentence on a misdemeanor conviction of prohibited acts.

In argument, Katims told the justice that the trial judge erred by “retroactively” instructing the jury when they emerged with a question during deliberations to disregard certain testimony viewed as critical to McAllister’s defense.

David Tartter, a deputy state’s attorney and prosecutor, argued before the court that the conviction should stand.

McAllister attended the brief hearing, sitting in the front row directly behind his attorneys.

Three years ago, he was arrested only a short distance away, just outside the Statehouse where he represented Franklin County. He was suspended from the state Senate in 2016. A bid to return to Montpelier was derailed when he lost a re-election bid in the primary later that year.

Initially, he faced two counts of felony sexual assault, alleging he raped two women who worked for him — one of whom was the tenant farmhand. He also faced three counts of prohibited acts relating to prostitution. One of the charges of prohibited acts was later dropped.

He stood trial twice, each involving a different woman. In the first trial in 2016, one of the sexual assault charges was dropped when it was discovered that his accuser perjured herself on a minor detail during her testimony.

In the second jury trial, in July 2017, McAllister was acquitted of a second felony sexual assault charge alleging he twice raped the woman who had lived and worked on his Highgate farm.

That jury also acquitted him of a prohibited acts charge. That charge alleged that his relationship with that woman, spanning several years from 2012 to his arrest, was coercive and amounted to prostitution.

The jury did convict him on a second prohibited acts charge. The charge accused him of arranging for the woman to have sex with one of his friends in order to pay back $70 McAllister loaned her.