CHRISTCHURCH: According to details shared by the white supremacist Brenton Tarrant’s lawyer, Tony Ellis, the former is considering to appeal his life sentence, handed to him by a New Zealand court last year.
His lawyer, while speaking to a state radio, told that Tarrant had pled guilty under duress. Tarrant was handed a life sentence without possibility of parole, the first of its kind sentence in history of New Zealand, last year after he was convicted of murdering 51 worshippers in cold blood and injuring 40 others in two mosque attacks in Christchurch in March 2019.
“He [Tarrant] said because of how he was treated while he was awaiting trial and afterwards, (that affected) his will to carry on and he decided that the simplest way out was to plead guilty,” Ellis said.
He clarified that Tarrant meant that he was treated unfairly because of ‘degrading treatment’.
The Christchurch mosque attacks had left 51 people, including four Pakistanis dead. New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Arden had declared the attack as “one of the darkest days” in this history of the country.