The Pleasure of Terror: Inside Brenton Tarrant s Bid to Reclaim His Guilty Plea

 

An Unprecedented Appeal

The Prisoner of Extreme Risk: Conditions and Complaints

He Was Pleased : The Terrorism Charge as a Badge of Honor

The Lawyers Testimony: A Client Obsessed with Control

Don t Worry, It Won t Get to That : The Inevitable Plea

The Ideological Defence That Never Was

Mental State on Trial: Competing Psychological Evidence

Victims and the Weight of a Delayed Justice

What Happens Next: Trial or Finality?

On the morning of March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant livestreamed himself driving to the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, entering the building, and methodically executing 51 worshippers at point-blank range. Children died that day. So did mothers, fathers, imams, and refugees who had fled war only to find death in a country advertised as peaceful. Six years later, Tarrant is back in a courtroom, but not to face new charges. He is there to argue that his guilty plea the admission that spared New Zealand the spectacle of a televised terrorism trial should be withdrawn. The man who once wanted to be described as a terrorist now claims he was too mentally unwell to rationally admit he was one.

The five-day hearing before the Court of Appeal in Wellington is not a retrial. It is a procedural inquiry into Tarrant s state of mind in March 2020, when he stood in the High Court and pleaded guilty to 51 counts of murder, 40 of attempted murder, and one charge of engaging in a terrorist act. His sentence, life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, was the harshest ever imposed in New Zealand. If his application succeeds, the convictions will be vacated, and the case will return to the High Court for a full trial. For survivors and the families of the deceased, the prospect is agonizing. For Tarrant, it is an opportunity to reclaim control over his own narrative.

Central to Tarrant s argument is the claim that his prison conditions were so severe they rendered him incapable of rational decision-making. Since his arrest days after the attack, Tarrant has been housed in the Prisoners of Extreme Risk Unit at Auckland Prison, a facility colloquially described as a prison within a prison. The unit was designed specifically for him and holds approximately a dozen of the country s most dangerous inmates -1-3. Tarrant told the court he was subjected to constant solitary confinement, deprived of meaningful human interaction, and kept under near-total surveillance. A camera monitored him at all times, with a single blind spot under a table in his cell -6. His phone calls were recorded and could be abruptly terminated if he attempted to disseminate his ideology -6. Access to reading material was restricted; books required staff vetting, and the general library was off limits. The activity sheets he was offered sometimes listed nothing more than towel, jandles and soap -6.

Tarrant described his mental state during this period as one of nervous exhaustion and wildly fluctuating stability -7-8. He told the justices that his identity and beliefs became uncertain, that he felt he had no choice but to plead guilty because there was little else I could do -7-8. He claimed he masked symptoms of serious mental illness to avoid appearing weak, a decision he said was motivated by his commitment to the white supremacist movement he represents. I was definitely doing everything possible to come across as confident, assured, mentally well, he testified -7. So I always wanted to put on the best front possible.

Crown lawyers have met this narrative with sustained skepticism. They note that Tarrant never requested a trial delay on mental health grounds, never formally raised fitness-to-plead concerns with prison medical staff, and was assessed by both a psychologist and a psychiatrist before his 2020 sentencing. Both clinicians concluded he was fit to plead -4. His current appeal was filed approximately two years late; he submitted documents in September 2022, far beyond the statutory 20-working-day limit -7-8. His explanation that he lacked necessary information has done little to persuade prosecutors that his case merits extraordinary judicial intervention.

The most striking testimony of the hearing thus far has come not from Tarrant himself, but from the men who once defended him. Jonathan Hudson and Shane Tait, barristers who represented Tarrant from late March 2019 until July 2020, were called as Crown witnesses. Their recollections portray a client whose relationship with his own legal proceedings was complex, performative, and distinctly ideological -2-3-5.

Hudson testified that when he informed Tarrant in late May 2019 that police had added a formal charge of engaging in a terrorist act, the response was not what any lawyer would expect. He was pleased, Hudson told the court -2-3-5. He wanted to be described as a terrorist. This enthusiasm for the terrorism designation was not a fleeting reaction. Tait confirmed that his client consistently expressed a desire to be convicted of the charge. To be clear, Mr. Tarrant never wanted to defend the terrorism charge. It was something he wanted to be convicted of, Tait said -2-3. This admission undermines Tarrant s current claim that he was coerced into pleading guilty. He did not plead guilty to terrorism despite his ideology; he pleaded guilty to terrorism because of it.

Throughout their representation, Hudson and Tait struggled to extract coherent instructions from a man who seemed more interested in controlling the proceedings than in mounting a defence. Tarrant initially pleaded not guilty to all charges in June 2019. Approximately six weeks later, he contacted Hudson and expressed a desire to plead guilty. Days later, he reversed course again -2-5. Hudson described this flip-flop as highly unusual -3. Tait offered a simpler explanation: his client was consistent about his ultimate intention to plead guilty, but inconsistent about when he would do so -2-6. He was just wanting to plead guilty at a time that suited his agenda, one could say, Tait testified -5.

Tait recalled pressing Tarrant for an arguable defence. Brenton, what am I going to tell a jury if we go to trial? he asked. Tarrant s reply was evasive and telling: Don t worry, it won t get that far -2-6. When Tarrant did propose a defence, it was not legally viable. He suggested he had been acting in defence of New Zealand against immigrant overpopulation, or that another shooter might have entered the mosque. Both lawyers advised him that such arguments were unavailable under New Zealand law, and Tarrant appeared to accept their advice -2-5-6. Yet he simultaneously entertained fantasies of dismissing his counsel and representing himself at trial not to prove his innocence, but to avoid being seen to be running away from the trauma he had caused the community -2-3.

Tarrant s ideology, Tait concluded, seemed to be more important to him than any fair trial rights -2-3.

The question of Tarrant s mental fitness has become a battleground of expert opinion. Two forensic mental health professionals assessed him prior to his 2020 sentencing and found him fit to plead. These assessments went unchallenged at the time. Tarrant s current legal team has introduced a new psychological report from a practitioner with name suppression, known only as Witness B, who concluded that the prison conditions likely contributed to a decline in Tarrant s mental health -6-4.

This conclusion was aggressively contested by Professor James Ogloff, Dean of Health Sciences at Swinburne University in Melbourne, who testified on behalf of the Crown. Ogloff questioned whether Tarrant had been truthful with Witness B, suggesting the inmate may have been consciously exaggerating the distress he claimed to be under -4. Ogloff noted that Witness B s report relied heavily on interviews conducted years after the guilty plea, a methodological weakness that undermined its reliability. The conditions Tarrant endured, Ogloff acknowledged, were not positive, but neither were they so harsh that severe mental deterioration was inevitable -4.

For the families of the 51 Muslim worshippers murdered on March 15, 2019, this hearing is an ordeal. Many travelled from Christchurch to Wellington to watch the proceedings via a delayed video feed in an adjoining courtroom. They have observed Tarrant appear by audiovisual link from his cell, clean-shaven and composed, wearing a pressed white shirt and black-framed glasses, his shaved head catching the fluorescent light -1-7. He speaks without hesitation, articulating his grievances with the clinical detachment of a man who has spent years refining his narrative. He expressed no remorse during his testimony. The remorse he briefly displayed at his 2020 sentencing, he now claims, was induced by the prison conditions and therefore irrational -2.

His victims families have waited six years for closure. They have attended every hearing, listened to every legal argument, and absorbed every news headline that forces them to relive the worst day of their lives. The prospect of a full trial with witness testimony, graphic evidence, and international media attention is a form of punishment they did not choose and do not deserve.

The three-judge panel Justice Christine French, Justice David Collins, and Justice Susan Thomas will deliver its decision at a later date -7-9. If the application is denied, Tarrant s subsequent appeal of his life sentence will be heard later this year. If the application is granted, the case will return to the High Court for trial. New Zealand would then confront what it narrowly avoided in 2020: a public, adversarial proceeding in which a self-proclaimed white supremacist is afforded a platform to articulate his ideology under the protection of legal process.

Brenton Tarrant migrated to New Zealand with the explicit intention of committing mass murder. He planned meticulously, acquired weapons illegally, and selected his targets with cold precision. He murdered 51 people and wounded 40 others. He livestreamed his atrocities to a global audience. He wrote a manifesto celebrating violence as a political tool. He was pleased to be called a terrorist. Now, he asks the courts to unwind the legal consequences of his own admissions. His argument is that he was too unwell to rationally admit what he had rationally planned for months. The evidence from his own lawyers suggests otherwise. The evidence from his own words suggests otherwise. The question before the Court of Appeal is not whether Brenton Tarrant is a terrorist. He has already answered that question himself, with pleasure.

Источник: https://parliament-herald.com/component/k2/item/216063