The New Zealand mosque shooter sought to overturn his guilty plea, saying prison made him irrational

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — The man who killed 51 Muslim worshipers at two mosques in New Zealand’s deadliest mass shooting told an appeals court Monday he felt compelled to plead guilty because of the “irrationality” of harsh prison conditions, as he sought to have his guilty pleas overturned.

A three-judge panel at the Court of Appeal in Wellington will hear five days of evidence on Brenton Tarrant’s claim that he is incompetent to plead guilty to terrorism, murder and attempted murder charges he faced after the 2019 attack on the city of Christchurch. If his bid is successful, his case will return to court for trial, which was adjourned until March 2020 when he pleaded guilty to the hate-fueled shooting.

He is seeking an appeal against a life sentence without the possibility of parole, which has never before been imposed in New Zealand. Tarrant’s testimony Monday about his state of mind when he pleaded guilty was that he spoke concretely in a public setting since he live-streamed the 2019 massacre on Facebook.

The shooter says he suffered “nervous exhaustion.”

The Australian man, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, had immigrated to New Zealand with the intention of committing genocide, which he had planned in detail. He amassed a cache of semiautomatic weapons, took steps to avoid detection and wrote a lengthy manifesto before traveling from Dunedin to Christchurch in March 2019 and opening fire on two mosques.

51 people were killed, the youngest a 3-year-old boy, with dozens of others seriously injured. The attack was considered one of New Zealand’s darkest days and organizations have sought to stop the spread of Tarrant’s message through legal injunctions and bans on possession of his manifesto or video of the attack.

Monday’s hearing was held under tight security barriers that severely limited who could see Tarrant’s evidence, including some journalists and those injured or grieving the massacre. Tarrant, wearing a white button-down shirt and black-rimmed glasses and with a shaved head, spoke on video from a white-walled cell at the Auckland jail.

Answering questions from Crown attorneys and attorneys representing him, Tarrant, 35, said his mental health was impaired by prison conditions, where he was held in solitary confinement with limited reading material or contact with other inmates.

When he pleaded guilty, Tarrant said he suffered from “nervous exhaustion” and uncertainty about his identity and beliefs. He pleaded guilty months before his trial began because “there was little I could do,” he told the court.

Crown attorneys said there was no evidence of serious mental illness

Crown attorney 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 gone ahead with the trial and defended himself, Hawes said.

Hawes also found that Tarrant had no evidence of any serious mental distress in his behavior documentation from mental health experts and prison staff. Tarrant suggested that the symptoms of mental illness he displayed were not recorded and that he sometimes tried to mask them.

“I was definitely doing everything possible to come across as confident, assured, mentally sound,” he told the court. Tarrant’s behavior “reflects the political movement I’m a part of,” he added. “So I always want to put forward the best possible.”

He agreed that he had access to legal advice in court proceedings. Tarrant’s current attorneys have been granted name suppression because they feared it would make them vulnerable when they represented him.

The outcome of the appeal will come later

Bids to appeal a conviction or sentence in New Zealand must be made within 20 working days. Tarrant filed court papers in September 2022 to seek an appeal, nearly two years late.

He told the court on Monday that his bid was delayed because he did not have access to the information he needed to make it.

The trial will continue for the rest of the week but the judges are expected to issue their decision at a later date. If they deny Tarrant’s attempt to overturn his guilty pleas, a later hearing will focus on his bid to appeal his conviction.