A former RCMP officer who pleaded guilty to lying under oath was involved with some of the evidence in a Yukon Supreme Court murder trail currently underway.

Former staff sergeant Ross Spinard took the stand Wednesday and this morning in the trial of Norman Larue.

Larue is facing a first-degree murder charge in the 2008 death of 63-year-old Gordon Seybold.

The Crown is alleging Larue, 30, beat Seybold and burned his cabin to the ground, working with his then-fiancée.

At the time of the Seybold investigation, Spinard was working at the RCMP's regional forensic identification support service in Vancouver.

In 2011, he pleaded guilty to a charge of perjury and was given a nine-month conditional sentence.

He had retired from the police force a year earlier.

Spinard told the court Wednesday that during his 33-year-career with the RCMP, he had testified as an expert in about 40 murder cases, though he said that was just a guess.

In court, expert witnesses are qualified by the judge to give opinions during their testimony to the jury.

Spinard was not designated an expert when he testified Wednesday.

The perjury charge stemmed from a 2009 murder trial in B.C. in which Spinard, a blood-stain expert, admitted to lying under oath about a report he had written.

That fact led to many exchanges between the officer and Larue's lawyer, Ray Dieno, who took Spinard to task over his honesty in the previous case.

"You lied repeatedly to the jury,” he said.

Dieno asked the former officer if he thought about the damage he was doing to the justice system by lying.

"Obviously I didn't, because if I did, I wouldn't have done what I did,” Spinard replied.

He called that time in his life "a portion of my past I am trying to put behind me.”

In his cross-examination today, he quoted the judge from the 2009 case, who called Spinard's testimony at the time, "completely tainted and without any value whatsoever.”

In the Seybold case, Spinard was involved with a string of evidence, including a bat and two rifles found in a rest stop dumpster not far from the scene of the fire.

The jury has already heard from an investigator who testified Seybold's death was classified as a homicide after he was told a DNA link was found between Seybold and the bloody weapons.

In court Wednesday, Spinard told the jury he was asked by investigators to look at the weapons for things like fingerprints, other trace evidence and blood stain patterns.

He doesn't do DNA analysis. All he does is identify areas for examination by other people, he said.

He explained that he was an RCMP member, not an official member of the lab, so had limited access to the items which were stored there.

In the case of the rifles and bat, he told the court, he took the items off-site from the original lab to a different RCMP facility, where he examined them.

He testified there were no hairs nor fibres found. While there did appear to be fingerprints, none were detailed enough to be identifiable by traditional means.

Spinard said he did find blood stains. Samples were sent off for further analysis.

The former officer was also involved with other evidence, including a towel and a flashlight, but in those cases, he always worked with a member of the RCMP lab. He said he was never left alone with the items.

Aside from the rifles and bat in the Seybold case, Spinard testified, he doesn't think he's ever withdrawn items from the RCMP lab on his own.

During cross-examination, Dieno questioned Spinard about the report he completed in the Seybold case.

In January 2009, the completed report was originally held back from being released after another officer reviewed the information.

Spinard told the court the two had a "difference of opinion.”

Eventually, the report was released, with some changes made.

Dieno suggested that difference of opinion was related to how the blood got on the bat.

Since leaving the RCMP, Spinard has been working for a hospital transport company.

Under cross-examination, he told the jury he still recieves his pension from the RCMP even after his conviction.

The maximum sentence for perjury is 14 years in prision.

The trial, which began in early April, is scheduled to last three months.