VANCOUVER (AFP) — The lawyers for an alleged mass murderer launched their defence Tuesday, after months of gruesome prosecution evidence in the trial of a pig farmer charged with killing scores of prostitutes.
Robert Pickton's legal team will focus on his limited intelligence, lawyer Adrian Brooks told the court in this western Canadian metropolis.
Pickton, 57, is on trial for six of 26 murder charges, with a second trial on another 20 cases expected to follow. All of his alleged victims were drug-addicted prostitutes who sold sex on the squalid streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.
Pickton pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have repeatedly said he did not kill the women whose bodies were found on his farm.
Brooks said he will call several witnesses, including psychologists and acquaintances, to testify about how Pickton was held back a year in elementary school and left school at age 16.
Since last January a jury has heard how police found severed body parts in freezers, buckets and under a pig pen, traces of DNA in blood, and personal belongings of the six women. The court also heard tapes of Pickton making apparently incriminating statements to police officers.
But Brooks suggested that other people had been present on Pickton's property and that Pickton wasn't intelligent enough to understand the implications of the case.
Brooks noted that the day after police first raided his farm Pickton simply went about his regular work, and asked the jury to consider Pickton's bizarre comments to police in light of his limited intelligence.
Prosecutors earlier stressed several shocking statements Pickton made, including a suggestion that he had wanted to kill 50 women. "I was gonna do one more and make it an even 50," the jury heard Pickton say on a taped conversation in a jail cell with an undercover policeman.
The current trial is part of a wider investigation into the disappearance of more than 60 women.
At another point in that interview, Pickton had recommended a rendering plant as a way to dispose of bodies, after the officer had talked about dumping corpses in the ocean.
"I did better than that," boasted Pickton. "A rendering plant."
Pickton's lawyers also attacked the credibility of key prosecution witnesses, including Lynn Ellingsen, a drug addict and Pickton's former friend who had testified that she saw Pickton butchering a woman's body in a pig slaughterhouse in March 1999.
"If she saw what she said she saw, did it make sense that she would run away from the farm and never stay there again?" Brooks asked the jury.
Instead, Brooks suggested that Ellingsen stayed at Pickton's farm after the alleged butchering. He called as a witness an ambulance attendant who responded to a call on March 29 at Pickton's farm for Ellingsen, who felt ill after taking cocaine.
The defence case is expected to take less than a month. Justice James Williams is expected to take several weeks to prepare instructions for the jury before it is asked to decide whether Pickton is guilty.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
