NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C. - Lawyers in the Robert Pickton trial have reached a deal that shaves a number of witnesses off the mammoth list of experts giving testimony.
Crown lawyer Mike Petrie told the court Wednesday that there have been agreements made between his team and the defence on the continuity of evidence.
Thousands of pieces of evidence were collected in the massive search of Pickton's farm that eventually led to 26 murder charges being laid against him for the deaths of women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
Pickton is currently on trial for six of those counts.
The agreement means the Crown is no longer obligated to prove that the evidence wasn't tampered with during its collection as the defence agrees that no such tampering occurred.
In instructing the jury on how to handle the admission, Justice James William told them that without such an agreement, the Crown would have had to call every police officer who handled each and every one of the exhibits.
But with the agreement, fewer witnesses would need to be called.
The jury has already heard from more than 50 people since the trial began at the end of January. The Crown had initially estimated they would be calling at least 240 witnesses.
News of the admissions came prior to Const. Bev Zaporozan taking the stand to link some of the exhibits found at the Pickton farm to the numbers given to them by the computerized tracking system.
Zaporozan was the chief exhibit custodian for more than a year.
She testified that a simple numbering system used to track exhibits quickly became insufficient as the number of items seized ballooned.
Among the items she referenced in court were syringes, a pig carcass hanging in a walk-in freezer, bones found in the soil, a .22- calibre shell casing and some zap straps.
Over the course of the trial, the jury has relied on photographs of items seized from the farm, lugging in binders of them to their seats in the jury box every day.
The binders are divided into volumes and tabs, each section representing different areas from which evidence was taken. The binders themselves are then entered as exhibits, rather than each individual photograph.
The Crown departed from that tradition Wednesday, entering seven items themselves as exhibits in the trial.
Jurors had already heard about a sheaf of papers from an address book found in the pocket of a jacket linked by DNA to Andrea Joesbury, as well as a rectangular bottle with a hole in it found there as well. Evidence had also already been entered on a stained clipboard with papers in it, that DNA tests linked to Pat Casanova, who was arrested but never charged in connection with the deaths of the six women.
When jurors retire to deliberate the case, they'll be allowed to see them in person as well.
Other items entered were a number of condoms found with stickers on them, though not the same stickers as that found on a lipstick and the rectangular bottle also entered into evidence.
A miscellaneous sheaf of papers also became its own exhibit.
"We haven't put in too many physical exhibits in this case for a variety of reasons,'' Petrie said after they'd been entered into evidence.
''But the contents of these packages, I suppose the jury is entitled to manipulate them, but there is some danger associated with this.''
The judge said the exhibits will not be in the hands of the jury any time soon, but said when they were delivered to the jury he would give them the appropriate instruction.
The seven-man, five-woman jury wasn't told why these exhibits were chosen.
Pickton is on trial for killing Joesbury, Mona Wilson, Sereena Abotsway, Georgina Papin, Brenda Wolfe and Marnie Frey.
He is expected to stand trial for the remaining 20 charges at a later date.
