During a scuffle at the Secure Psychiatric Unit inside the New Hampshire State Prison for men, prosecutors say Jason Rothe was handcuffed and forcibly restrained, which led to his death.

Corrections officer Matthew Millar knelt on Rothe’s back, putting pressure on his lungs, killing him, they said.

“Individual and institutional failures do not change the fact that the defendant was indifferent to Jason’s life and that Jason died,” Senior Assistant Attorney General Dan Jimenez said in opening arguments of Millar’s trial for second-degree murder, which began Tuesday. “The defendant ignored his training, he ignored his common sense.”

Unlike those held in the unit who had been charged with crimes, Rothe was deemed too aggressive for the state psychiatric hospital and moved to the prison.

In April 2023, when 50-year-old Rothe refused to leave a recreation room, correctional officers moved to extract him by force. A scramble between the officers and Rothe grew physical, and he was eventually handcuffed on the ground. He was restrained on a stretcher and moved to another room, according to documents in the case.

It was then officers and unit staff noticed that he was not breathing, and began CPR. He was later pronounced dead. Months later, the state medical examiner ruled the death a homicide by combined compressional and positional asphyxia.

Some video of the incident exists, but rules at the facility that the full use of force should have been documented were not followed.

In opening arguments Tuesday, prosecutors lined up an argument that, regardless of missteps by others inside the department of corrections that led up to and followed Rothe’s death, it was Millar’s restraint that killed him.

Attorneys for Millar said the scenario that prosecutors described to jurors never happened.

Millar never knelt atop Rothe, only beside him, attorney Jordan Strand said, and Rothe died from a heart attack induced by the stress of the situation, pre-existing medical conditions and the medication he was taking.

Strand laid out a case in which the state is pointing the finger at Millar to avoid facing liability for a string of policy violations that had been normalized in the secure psychiatric unit.

“Jason Rothe died of a heart attack,” Strand said. “But this prosecution has never been about prosecuting a guilty man, it’s about finding someone to blame.”

Millar was charged in February of 2024. The trial will continue Wednesday.