Charlotte Graham-McLay
Wellington: The Australian man who killed 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in New Zealand’s deadliest mass shooting has told an appeals court he felt forced to admit to the crimes because of “irrationality” due to harsh prison conditions, as he sought to have his guilty pleas discarded.
A panel of three judges at the Court of Appeal in Wellington will hear five days of evidence about Brenton Tarrant’s claim that he was not fit to plead to the terrorism, murder and attempted murder charges he faced after the 2019 attack in the city of Christchurch.
If his bid is successful, his case would return to court for a trial, which was averted when he admitted to the hate-fuelled shooting in March 2020.
He is also seeking to appeal his sentence of life without the chance of parole, which had never been imposed in New Zealand before.
Tarrant’s evidence on Monday about his mental state when he pleaded guilty was the first time he had spoken substantively in a public setting since he livestreamed the 2019 massacre on Facebook.
Tarrant, a self-declared white supremacist, migrated to New Zealand with a view to committing the massacre, which he planned in detail. He amassed a cache of semiautomatic weapons, took steps to avoid detection and wrote a lengthy manifesto before he drove from Dunedin to Christchurch in March 2019 and opened fire at two mosques.
Along with 51 people killed, the youngest a three-year-old boy, dozens of others were severely wounded.
The attack was considered one of New Zealand’s darkest days, and institutions have sought to curb the spread of Tarrant’s message through legal orders and a ban on possession of his manifesto or video of the attack.
Monday’s hearing took place under tight security constraints that severely limited who could view Tarrant’s evidence, which included some reporters and those hurt or bereaved in the massacre.
Tarrant, who wore a white button-down shirt and black-rimmed glasses and had a shaved head, spoke via video link from a white-walled room in prison.
Answering questions from a Crown lawyer and from lawyers representing him, Tarrant, 35, said his mental health had deteriorated due to conditions in prison, where he was held in solitary confinement with limited reading material or contact with other prisoners.
By the time he pleaded guilty, Tarrant said he was “irrational” and suffering from “nervous exhaustion” and uncertainty about his identity and beliefs. He had admitted to the crimes a few months before his trial was due to begin because there was “little else I could do”, he told the court.
“I was making choices, but they were not choices made rationally due to the conditions,” Tarrant said. “… I wasn’t fit to plead at that point.”
Crown lawyer Barnaby Hawes suggested to Tarrant during questioning that the Australian man had other options. He could have requested a delay in his trial date on mental health grounds or could have proceeded to trial and defended himself, Hawes said.
Hawes also put to Tarrant that there was little evidence in the documentation of his behaviour by mental health experts and prison staff that he was in any kind of serious mental crisis.
Tarrant suggested that the signs of mental illness he displayed hadn’t been recorded and that at times he had sought to mask them.
“I was definitely doing everything possible to come across as confident, assured, mentally well,” he told the court.
Tarrant’s behaviour “reflected the political movement I’m a part of”, he added. “So I always wanted to put on the best front possible.”
He agreed that he had had access to legal advice throughout the court process.
Tarrant’s current lawyers have been granted name suppression because they feared representing him would make them unsafe.
Bids to appeal convictions or sentences in New Zealand must be made within 20 working days. Tarrant was about two years late in seeking an appeal, filing documents with the court in September 2022.
He told the court on Monday that his bid had been late because he hadn’t had access to the information required to make it.
The hearing is due to run for the rest of the week but the judges are expected to release their decision at a later date.
If they reject Tarrant’s attempt to have his guilty pleas discarded, a later hearing will focus on his bid to appeal his sentence.