WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — The man who killed 51 Muslim worshipers at two mosques in New Zealand’s deadliest mass shooting told an appeals court Monday that he felt forced to admit to the crimes because of “irrationality” due to harsh prison conditions, as he sought to have his guilty pleas discarded.

A panel of three judges at the Court of Appeal in Wellington will hear five days of evidence about Brenton Tarrant’s claim that he was not fit to plead to the terrorism, murder and attempted murder charges he faced after the 2019 attack in the city of Christchurch. If his bid is successful, his case would return to court for a trial, which was averted in March 2020 when he admitted to the hate-fueled shooting.

He is also seeking to appeal his sentence of life without the chance of parole, which had never been imposed in New Zealand before. Tarrant’s evidence Monday about his mental state when he pleaded guilty was the first time he had spoken substantively in a public setting since he livestreamed the 2019 massacre on Facebook.

The Australian man, a self-declared white supremacist, migrated to New Zealand with a view to committing the massacre, which he planned in detail. He amassed a cache of semiautomatic weapons, took steps to avoid detection, and wrote a lengthy manifesto before he drove from Dunedin to Christchurch in March 2019 and opened fire at two mosques.

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