The importance of allowing the Christchurch Terrorist his day in court

Christchurch mosque shooter launches appeal bid, claims prison conditions made him insane

The Christchurch mosque shooter claims he was effectively “forced” to plead guilty because harsh prison conditions drastically impacted his mental health.

“I was forced to,” convicted terrorist Brenton Harrison Tarrant told the Court of Appeal in Wellington, where he is today seeking leave to appeal his convictions and vacate his guilty plea.

“If I had another option, I would have taken it.”

He said his mental health deteriorated after he was imprisoned and awaiting trial, and he was essentially not fit to plead guilty when he did, which was shortly after New Zealand went into its first Covid-19 lockdown at the end of March 2020.

“I did not have the mind frame or mental health required to be making informed decisions at that time,” the gunman said.

“I think the issue is, did I really know what I wanted to do or what would be a good idea? No, I didn’t actually.”

“I was making choices, but they were not choices made voluntarily and they were not choices made rationally due to the conditions.”

Tarrant also said that any expression of remorse he felt about his offending was induced by the harsh prison conditions he was facing.

NZ Herald

 

None of us will be happy to see the Christchurch white supremacist terrorist attempting to relitigate and appeal his conviction in Christchurch this week.

Many of us will be disgusted that he gets to waste one more second of our time and resource for his murderous atrocity committed upon an innocent Muslim population.

In terms of his actual argument, he is claiming he was so out of it and that the prison conditions were so torturous that he wasn’t in his right mind when he pleaded guilty and showed remorse, which feels like an enormous stretch.

He seemed to know exactly what he was doing when he made a white supremacy signal in court during his first appearance, and the argument to his mental well being will be a tight rope to walk because butchering 51 people in cold blood is not a rational act.

He wants to claim he was rational in his barbarism and mutated thinking to justify his insane white supremacy theories while pretending he was too irrational once taken into custody to plead properly.

Bullhsit.

The victims of his crime feel deeply upset and resentful that he is having this opportunity to challenge his sentence, but it is a process we must respect and we must see through no matter the trauma and revulsion for two reasons.

The first reason is the magnitude of the punishment that was meted out. This racist scumbag will be in prison for life without parole, that is a punishment that is unique and must allow all legal avenues to be reasonably exhausted in challenging and defending that punishment.

The second reason is because we as a people are far better than him and his hate. His hope was to create a backlash from Muslims to start warring with the domestic cultures they lived in, instead he was shown mercy and given legal protections and rights because we are a liberal progressive democracy and we protect the innate intrinsic rights of the individual, no matter the abominations they wrought.

In our mercy, in our respect for the law and the rights of the individual do we denounce his act of hate and refuse to be provoked into mutilating ourselves they way he did in Christchurch.

I know giving this scumbag legal rights grates with many who are rightfully disgusted by his violence, but it is in the refusal to lower our values that we ultimately beat scum like this.