Five days in court with the ‘irrational’ Christchurch terrorist
Saturday, 14 February 2026
This week, convicted murderer and terrorist Brenton Tarrant had a case heard at the Court of Appeal in Wellington. He was seeking leave to appeal his convictions and to vacate his guilty pleas for killing 51 people and injuring 40 more at two Christchurch mosques in 2019. MICHAEL WRIGHT watched an extraordinary hearing held under unprecedented security.
It is a measure of a person’s established awfulness ‒ and Brenton Tarrant has provided humanity with ample evidence that he is among the most awful ever to belong to its number ‒ that they can always find new and unlikely ways to disgust you.
For Tarrant, it wasn’t his gall in this week pursuing an appeal over offending for which he was obviously and appallingly responsible. It was the window he opened into his mind, reminding everyone of its perverse contents even as he sits in a prison he will never leave.
His application, heard over five days this week at the Court of Appeal in Wellington before Justices French, Thomas and Collins, focused on his claim that the “torturous and inhumane” conditions to which he was subjected in prison so altered his state of mind that he was not fit to plead guilty to his crimes as he did in March 2020.
Among the indignities was that he did not have very much to read, including news articles, which he had to ask his lawyers to bring copies of, specifying stories in advance.
What stories did he want? “International news,” Tarrant said in evidence. “Not as much as I would have liked but [my lawyer] was very helpful in that regard.”
He listed some: the Notre-Dame cathedral fire, the Ukrainian airliner shot down by Iran, the attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines. All perfectly newsworthy events. Except when you know that the person who wants to read about them is not a current affairs boffin but someone who murdered 51 people and injured 40 more in the name of a grotesque white supremacist ideology.
Cue new and unlikely disgust. Even reading the world pages of a newspaper can be an act of hatred. How did we get here?
‘Just attention-seeking’
The terrorist filed his appeal in November 2022, more than two years after he was sentenced. The standard time limit for doing so is 20 days. The court this week was only considering if there were grounds to allow an appeal so late; “out of time”, as it calls it.
But the hearing might as well have been an appeal. There were three days of evidence and two days of arguments on Tarrant’s claim that his “irrationality induced by prison conditions” meant he wasn’t thinking straight in March 2020, so the guilty pleas he offered back then should be vacated.
It was also an unwelcome shift in perspective. Ever since the shooting stopped, the terrorist stopped being the centre of attention. His victims, their families and the entire Islamic community instead came to the fore and have stayed there. Tarrant was anonymised: the terrorist, a white supremacist. The media referred to him by name sparingly. Usually just once. Everyone was pretty happy about that.
This would be the first time since that black day where the matter at hand was entirely, hopelessly, unavoidably about him. His appeal, his move to vacate. His crimes, his victims, their families, were all relegated to the background while he had another day in court. “I’m appalled,” Rosemary Omar, whose son Tariq Omar died at the Al Noor mosque on Deans Ave, said before the hearing. “He’s just attention-seeking to keep it out there and traumatise [us].”
By the end of this week her fears were confirmed. “I’m shattered,” she told The Press during an adjournment on Thursday. “I feel like he’s abusing his rights… It’s [been] really difficult to sleep, it’s really difficult to get up. Everything that Counsel B [one of the terrorist’s lawyers ‒ they all have name suppression] has described [about Tarrant’s mindset] I’m pretty sure all of us in the community are experiencing ‒ depression, sleep issues. That's the world we live in.”
So it was fitting on Monday morning when the first thing Justice Christine French, president of the Court of Appeal, said was to Rosemary Omar and everyone like her: “Firstly and very importantly I would like to acknowledge the presence of victims and family who are watching this hearing remotely.”
Then the terrorist took the stand. The voyeur in all of us leaned in. What did he look like? What would he say? The answer to the first question was ‒ not much. Bald, bespectacled, business-casual; he looked unexceptional in a way almost too easy to mock: geography teacher, urologist, guy here to fix your wi-fi. Mr Plain. Insert glib reference to forgettability here.
The answer to the second question was ‒ quite a lot. Tarrant was questioned for three hours. The longest of any witness. He spoke about the “abysmal” reading material, his jailers mocking him by pretending they couldn’t hear what he was saying, and the general lack of mental stimulation living in isolation (the very legitimate effects of solitary confinement on prisoners would later be traversed in intense detail).
His pleas, he said, were not a decision so much as a lack of options, and he thought the conditions of his incarceration might improve if he just said “guilty”.
“I was quite irrational,” he told the court. “I was not sure of my ideas or thoughts or what I should be doing. So I was not fit to plead at that point.”
The same went for August 2019, when he also decided to plead guilty but changed his mind. “Induced by the conditions,” he said. “I stopped myself once I was given a book to read.”
He said he always planned to plead not guilty and defend himself at trial. (It seemed lost on him, even though his lawyers at the time said they explained it, that no judge would ever let him put his ridiculous case of “self-defence” to a jury.) On this, his former lawyers were no help to him. In evidence, they agreed that their client’s prison conditions were harsh, perhaps unduly so, and that Corrections were “dismissive” when they raised what appeared to be justifiable complaints. But going to trial? No.
“That’s not something that he ever said to me,” lawyer Jonathan Hudson said. “He was inconsistent about when he was going to plead guilty [but he was] consistent on that being the ultimate plea.”
Co-counsel Shane Tait even roleplayed it for the court: “Brenton, what am I going to tell the jury if we get to trial?” To which, he said, Tarrant replied: “Don’t worry it won't get that far.”
If he was so disturbed through this time, surely someone would have noticed? Tarrant said his lawyers asked repeatedly about his wellbeing, worried about changes in his personality and appearance. The lawyers called bullshit on that, too. “[His] mindset was consistent across all of our meetings,” Hudson said. “I had no cause to note anything different.”
On this, Tarrant didn't help himself by also saying he was masking during this time. Putting on a brave face. “I was definitely doing everything possible to come across as quite confident, assured and mentally well,” he said. “Trying to present as well as I possibly could.”
This, he said, might make it difficult for his lawyers to notice his being disturbed (except when he said they did and asked him directly? This point was never reconciled), but not the prison guards who watched him on CCTV and physically checked his cell every 15 minutes. “The staff, they watched every single second,” he said. “The idea they didn’t notice is just impossible. It’s absolutely impossible. They had to have known.”
The two Corrections officials who testified did not agree with this. Crown lawyer Barnaby Hawes took up the point: “[Corrections] staff kept detailed daily notes of your behaviour. If the dramatic outward signs you’re describing were occurring you’d expect them to be in those notes would you?”
“No,” the terrorist replied, “because they wouldn’t want to incriminate themselves. They’re not fools.” (Shortly after this exchange, Tarrant added another wrinkle, acknowledging that he timed his eventual guilty plea to coincide with New Zealand’s first Covid-19 lockdown. He wanted, he said, to “do the unexpected” to “damage the state” and catch the media “off-guard”. All of it amounted to a fair bit of self-awareness for a guy supposedly out of his mind.)
Who, then, would corroborate his irrationality? Two expert reports on the terrorist’s mental state from August 2020, which both found he had been mentally fit enough to plead guilty, were discussed at length. A clinical psychologist, witness B, interviewed Tarrant in 2025 and testified that the terrorist’s complaints to him about prison conditions showed they were “onerous” and that his “judgement and ability to make informed choices was impacted”.
He walked this back, somewhat, under cross-examination, defending his decision to take Tarrant’s self-reports at face value. “I’ve never said he wasn’t fit to plead at all,” he said. “I’m trying to explain how he went from [pleading] not guilty, to guilty, then back to not guilty.”
All this, the Crown argued, amounted to a failed appeal. “[Tarrant] made an informed choice in circumstances where he was between a rock and a rock,” Crown lawyer Madeleine Laracy told the court in final arguments. “If he pleaded he was certain of conviction, if he went to trial a conviction was a certainty.”
Irrelevant, Tarrant’s lawyers said. The matter was a simple question of miscarriage of justice. However hopeless the terrorist’s position, however murderous his intent and certain his conviction, unfit to plead is unfit to plead.
“Mr Tarrant’s circumstances are like no other,” said Counsel B. “They are far more extreme than any other prisoner in New Zealand history.” They cited a Supreme Court decision from 2023: “It is not disputed that the fact a plea is not voluntarily and willingly given may give rise to a miscarriage.”
“That, in my submission, is the door left ajar,” Counsel B said. “It is open for the court to consider the voluntariness of plea. [It is] this concept … which we rely on to frame the appeal.”
In her coverage of the trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the holocaust who was captured in Argentina by Israeli agents in 1960 and tried in Jerusalem, the historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt famously remarked on the defendant’s ordinariness in appearance: “Medium-sized, slender, middle-aged, with receding hair, ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes.”
Eichmann, almost as famously, insisted in his defence that he had no choice but to organise the wholesale slaughter of European Jews ‒ he was bound by an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler.
Together, those two ideas helped Arendt craft the famous subtitle for her epic report ‒ “the banality of evil”. Just an ordinary man following orders. The phrase has since caught on as an easy reference for the everyday awfulness of extraordinary villains. It applies to the feeble Brenton Tarrant, of course, but with one difference.
Tarrant is no Eichmann. No cog in an elaborate machine. He committed a single murderous act that will be remembered only as much as is legally necessary and for which, regardless of appeal, he will die in prison. The master of his own pathetic fate.
The court has reserved its decision.