Brenton Tarrant shot dead 51 Muslim worshippers, including children, at two Christchurch mosques in 2019.
Published on 30 April 2026
Australian white supremacist killer Brenton Tarrant has lost an appeal to overturn his conviction and sentence for shooting dead 51 people at two New Zealand mosques in 2019, court documents reveal.
New Zealand’s appeals court rejected Tarrant’s appeal on Thursday, ruling that his attempt to overturn his guilty plea to the country’s deadliest mass shooting was “completely devoid of merit.”
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The 35-year-old man had admitted carrying out the mass shooting before being sentenced to life in prison in August 2020.
Tarrant filed an appeal in February, claiming that “torturous and inhumane” detention conditions during his trial left him incapable of making rational decisions, after he pleaded guilty to 51 charges of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one count of terroristic attack in the 2019 mass shooting.
Tarrant, who is serving life in prison without parole for the killings of Muslim worshipers at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Center in Christchurch on March 15, 2019, livestreamed his attack for 17 minutes.
Before committing this atrocity, he had also published an online manifesto, in which children, women and the elderly were targeted.
In its decision released Thursday, the three-judge panel said it conducted two types of investigations, one on Tarrant’s mental state at the time of the guilty plea and whether his pleas were voluntary, local media outlet The Post reported.
The judges said the court “did not accept Mr Tarrant’s evidence regarding his mental state”.
The judges said, “There were inconsistencies in Mr Tarrant’s own evidence, and his evidence contradicts the detailed observations of prison officers and the assessments of mental health professionals at the time of his petition.”
The judges found that Tarrant’s guilty pleas were voluntary, and “he was not forced or pressured in any way to plead guilty”.
The court said, “The evidence shows that at the time he pleaded guilty, prison conditions were not having any significant psychological effect on him.”
“The facts relating to Mr Tarrant’s offending are beyond dispute. He has not identified any arguable defence, or indeed any defense known to the law.”
Lawyers representing Tarrant’s survivors and the victims’ families told national broadcaster RNZ that the court’s decision had been a “huge relief”.
“The family, and frankly all of us, will be spared the trauma of having to live through a trial again on March 15,” he said.
“It is a huge relief that families will no longer be burdened with the huge burden of new testing on the difficult and often unsupported journey they have to undertake. This would have been unimaginably painful.”
