NZ News
Christchurch terrorist’s appeal to overturn convictions and life sentence dismissed
The white supremacist terrorist who massacred 51 worshippers at two Christchurch mosques will remain in prison for the rest of his life after the Court of Appeal dismissed his attempt to overturn his convictions and sentence.
Survivors and families of the victims were relieved the court declined Brenton Tarrant’s appeals, saying the decision spares them from reliving the trauma again.
During a week-long Court of Appeal hearing in February, the terrorist claimed he was “forced” to plead guilty to 92 charges following the March 2019 terror attack because he was irrational as a result of his prison conditions.
He wanted his convictions set aside and to stand trial instead.
A week after February’s hearing, the 35-year-old Australian then sought to abandon his appeal and fired his lawyer the following week.
The terrorist had to seek the court’s leave – or permission – to appeal his convictions and sentence out of time because his application was filed 505 days late.
In a unanimous decision released on Thursday, the court’s justices declined the terrorist’s application for leave and his application to abandon the appeal against his convictions.
The court granted his application to abandon the appeal against his sentence, which would have been heard at a later date.
“Mr Tarrant has failed by a considerable margin to adequately explain the extraordinarily long delay in filing his notice of appeal,” the court said.
“The facts concerning Mr Tarrant’s offending are beyond dispute. He has not identified any arguable defence, or indeed any defence known to the law. We have also rejected his claim that his guilty pleas were the product of him having an irrational state of mind induced by his prison conditions.
“Mr Tarrant’s proposed appeal is utterly devoid of merit.”
In a statement, lawyers acting for the survivors and families of victims said they were pleased by the court’s decision.
Photo: RNZ / Nathan Mckinnon
“This is a huge relief that the law has now done its job and that the families, and frankly all of us, will be spared the trauma of reliving the 15th of March all over again in a trial,” they said.
“It is a huge relief that the difficult and often unsupported journey families are on will not now be added to by the great burden of a new trial. It would have been unimaginably traumatic.
“This has not been easy. As families try to move on … and rebuild their lives seven years on, this appeal has been yet another challenge. But it is another challenge they have overcome and we acknowledge their resilience.”
Crown lawyers, including deputy solicitor-general Madeleine Laracy, met with some victims ahead of February’s hearing.
“The Crown considers it was extremely important for the victims’ sense of justice, and for wider public confidence in the appeal process, that the Court of Appeal delivered a judgment which addressed the merits of the appellant’s claims despite his attempt to abandon the appeal shortly after the five-day hearing. The judgment is thorough, and speaks for itself,” Laracy said.
Tarrant left 51 people dead or dying in little over 15 minutes after taking an arsenal of semi-automatic rifles, shotguns and incendiary devices to Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre on 15 March and opening fire as worshippers marked Jumu’ah – the most significant prayer of the Muslim week.
The terrorist initially pleaded not guilty in June 2019 to 51 counts of murder, 40 of attempted murder, and one of committing terrorism.
His former lawyers told the Court of Appeal in February he then wavered in late July 2019 and prepared to plead guilty before again changing his mind days later.
In March 2020, he formally pleaded guilty to all charges and was jailed for life without the possibility of parole in August 2020.
The terrorist had 20 working days to file an appeal against his convictions or sentence but the application came more than a year later in November 2022.
Source: RNZ
Latest News
Opportunities to mitigate multi-million-dollar RNZ budget blowout likely missed – experts
Multiple opportunities to identify and mitigate a multi-million-dollar budget blowout at RNZ appear have been missed, according to the former executive director at Audit New Zealand.
The public broadcaster on Monday revealed a near $12 million shock financial loss after a litany of financial blunders, which will now lead to sweeping job cuts.
The $11.8m loss is more than 25 times the $470,000 RNZ had expected to lose over the year to June.
CEO Paul Thompson took responsibility for the result, and said internal reports gave an inaccurate picture of the finances, meaning the scale of the loss only became clear in October.
RNZ’s former chief financial officer Hilary Parker resigned unexpectedly in early October.
The board said it would commission an independent review into what went wrong.
Independent contractor Stephen Walker, who left the Audit Office earlier this year, said the size of the loss was surprising, as was the length of time it took to identify it – months after the financial year ended.
Supplied / OAG
“Probably more of a concern is that they had seemingly been unaware that they were running up a significant deficit until they were in the preparation stage of their annual report in October.”
Walker said public entities typically produced monthly financial reports.
An interim audit also took place before the end of the financial year, he said, but if the organisation hadn’t identified significant losses at that stage, the auditor could also be in the dark.
“It seems that there’s a real weakness in forecasting and budgeting that’s occurred here and that the monthly accounts, when they’re produced, either haven’t identified these significant variances against budget or the magnitude of them really hasn’t come to light until right towards the end of the financial year,” Walker said.
“And really at that point, there’s no opportunity for the chief executive, the leadership team to take, and the board to take, any corrective action because the year has effectively been completed.”
Walker said the “significant miss” was difficult to account for given it was more than 10 percent of RNZ’s total funding.
He said based on RNZ’s annual report, financial complexity didn’t appear to be a factor.
“This $11.8m loss isn’t made up of one particular item … it seems to have been contributed to by a number of separate expense lines running over budget. So I don’t think it’s necessarily to do with complexity.”
Among the errors, RNZ wrongly counted $2m from land sales as income in its budget. Staff costs also came in $3.2m over budget, including $1.4m in redundancy payments.
Professor at Auckland University’s business school Norman Wong said based on media reports the issues identified were “significant and troubling”.
Supplied / University of Auckland
“But recognising the sale of land as income in their budget is a basic error that one would have expected to have been caught and corrected well before it got to this point.”
With funding reductions at RNZ over the past two years, Walker expected greater scrutiny of financial results.
“Virtually every public entity has had their annual budget reduced. And so you would expect … the leadership team on a monthly basis and board – I’m not sure how frequently the board will consider the information – but you would expect them to be interrogating the results on a regular basis throughout the year,” he said.
Walker said initiating an independent review was the correct course of action and that he’d want to understand what information the leadership team and the board were regularly receiving.
He said he’d “love to say” surprising financial results were rare, but conceded they occured on a semi-frequent basis during his time leading the Audit Office.
“The benefit of independent scrutiny by the Audit Office – and the auditors providing that support to the Auditor General – [is] that the reporting is fairly presented at the end of the year, whether it’s good, bad or ugly.”
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