WELLINGTON, New Zealand – In a ruling that brings renewed closure to survivors and grieving families of the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks, New Zealand’s Court of Appeal has dismissed white supremacist Brenton Tarrant’s bid to reverse his guilty pleas on charges of terrorism, murder, and attempted murder.
Tarrant, a 35-year-old Australian national, carried out one of the worst mass shootings in New Zealand’s modern history in March 2019. Targeting two Christchurch mosques during Friday prayers, he opened fire with semiautomatic weapons, killing 51 Muslim worshippers and wounding dozens more. He streamed the attack live online and published a lengthy manifesto detailing his violent white supremacist ideology under his real name.
In March 2020, Tarrant entered guilty pleas to all charges against him, a decision that spared the nation the trauma of a prolonged high-profile trial that many feared would give the extremist a platform to amplify his hateful rhetoric. On Thursday, a three-judge panel rejected Tarrant’s latest claim that harsh prison conditions had forced him to enter the guilty pleas against his will, noting first that the appeal was filed a staggering 505 days after the statutory deadline.
During a five-day hearing held in February, Tarrant, who has since dismissed his original legal team, also argued that his guilty pleas were the product of “irrationality” caused by poor mental health, claiming he had temporarily abandoned his racist views at the time of the plea deal. The three judges on the panel uniformly rejected this argument, finding Tarrant’s accounts of mental illness to be inconsistent and unsupported by evidence from prison staff, independent mental health professionals, and his former legal representatives.
In their written ruling, the judges emphasized: “He was not suffering from a mental impairment or any other form of mental incapacity which rendered him unable to voluntarily change his pleas to guilty. He endeavoured to mislead us about his state of mind in a weak attempt to advance an appeal in circumstances where all other evidence demonstrated that he made an informed and totally rational decision to plead guilty.”
The ruling also revealed an unusual procedural twist: shortly after Tarrant presented his case at the February hearing, he attempted to abandon the appeal himself. Judges rejected that request, noting that the case carried profound public importance and required a final, formal resolution. Court documents suggest Tarrant made the move to drop the appeal after recognizing his argument was unlikely to succeed, but New Zealand law does not require courts to allow appellants to withdraw a pending appeal once proceedings are underway.
Tarrant is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole at Auckland Prison, a sentence handed down in August 2020. The Court of Appeal did grant Tarrant’s request to abandon a separate planned appeal of his life sentence, which had been scheduled for hearing in 2026.
Court records confirm that Tarrant relocated to New Zealand from Australia in 2017, already planning the mass attack. He spent nearly two years accumulating weapons and conducting surveillance on the target mosques before carrying out the shooting. At the time of his guilty plea, he acknowledged the overwhelming weight of evidence against him, including the self-filmed livestream of his attack and his own publicly released manifesto laying out his racist motivations. Thursday’s ruling closes another chapter in the aftermath of the attack, preventing a retrial that would have re-traumatized victims and their families.