WELLINGTON: Appeal hearings for a white supremacist who shot dead 51 people at two New Zealand mosques in 2019 caused “immense distress” to his victims, a lawyer representing the state said Friday as proceedings wrapped up.
Brenton Tarrant, a 35-year-old Australian former gym instructor, admitted carrying out New Zealand’s deadliest modern-day mass shooting before being sentenced to life in jail in August 2020.
The convicted killer argued this week in Wellington’s Court of Appeal that “torturous and inhumane” detention conditions had made him incapable of making rational decisions when he pleaded guilty, according to a court synopsis of the case.
As a week of hearings came to a close on Friday, Crown lawyer Madeleine Laracy urged the court to dismiss Tarrant’s case because he had no legal defense to offer at trial and conviction was certain, state broadcaster RNZ reported.
She urged the court to give closure to the victims and the wider Muslim community.
“There are literally hundreds of directly harmed victims in this case and keeping this case alive is a source of immense distress for those individuals,” Laracy said, according to RNZ.
The three judges did not give a decision on Friday in his case.
Tarrant is being held in a specialist unit for prisoners of extreme risk at Auckland Prison, seldom interacting with inmates or other people.
- Life sentence -
On Monday, he gave evidence via video link and said he did not have the “mind frame or mental health required” to give an informed guilty plea in 2020.
But Laracy told the three-judge panel on Friday that Tarrant was always going to end up in prison whether he had pleaded guilty or not.
“He was between a rock and a rock,” she said.
Tarrant’s lawyers, whose names are suppressed for security reasons, said his prison conditions were unlike anything else in the system.
If the court upholds Tarrant’s conviction, it will also need to consider an appeal against his sentence.
If his conviction is overturned, the case will be sent to the High Court for a retrial.
Armed with an arsenal of semi-automatic weapons, Tarrant attacked worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch on March 15, 2019.
He published an online manifesto before the attacks and then livestreamed the killings for 17 minutes.
His victims were all Muslim and included children, women and the elderly.
His penalty of life imprisonment without parole was the stiffest in New Zealand history.
There were heavy restrictions on who could be in court during the appeal hearing, with only counsel, media and court officials allowed.
Families and friends of those killed or wounded in the attacks were invited to watch proceedings in Christchurch remotely by video with a one-hour delay.
