This story was originally produced by the Concord Monitor. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
The announcement came quietly. When the first “not guilty” rang out in the muffled courtroom, the audience sitting behind the defense table couldn’t help but gasp. They waited with bated breath as the jury read out the second acquittal, then the third.
Matthew Millar’s mom, Jane, burst into tears. Her son would walk free.
“He’s coming home. He’s coming home,” she said minutes later, crying and hugging supporters just outside the courtroom.
Millar, a former guard at the men’s prison in Concord, was charged in February 2024 with the second-degree murder of Jason Rothe, a patient at the Secure Psychiatric Unit located at the prison. He’d been accused of causing Rothe’s death in April 2023 by kneeling on his back for several minutes, putting pressure on his lungs.
In court on Wednesday after a roughly two-week trial, the jury found that Millar was, without a reasonable doubt, not guilty of that or of lesser homicide charges.
Rothe, 50, had refused to leave a recreation area several times and died after an altercation with several officers, including Millar. The medical examiner determined that Rothe’s death was a homicide caused by compressional and positional asphyxiation, and prosecutors claimed that the pressure from Millar’s knee on Rothe’s shoulder killed him as he laid in a prone position on the cement floor.
Millar’s attorneys attempted to poke holes in the state’s evidence, saying Rothe instead died of a heart attack. They said Millar only placed his knee on Rothe for a few seconds as a “transition” move while handcuffing him, and that not everyone saw Millar put pressure on the patient.
“The knees were only there for one to two seconds, and it was while Rothe was resistant,” said Eric Raymond, Millar’s attorney, during closing arguments.
They also pinned the chaotic extraction from the recreation room on the Department of Corrections’ training and culture, as well as the supervising officer, Lesley-Ann Cosgro, who they said directed the officers into the extraction without proper preparation or gear.
Some video from the start of the incident exists, but rules at the facility that the full use of force should have been documented were not followed.
Christopher Knowles, an assistant attorney general, painted Millar as having been angry at Rothe and having intentionally applied reckless and unnecessary force after other officers had already subdued Rothe and de-escalated the situation.
He argued that Millar would’ve known that Rothe couldn’t breathe and was dying on the floor underneath him, yet he kept his knee on his shoulder.
Now fully acquitted, Millar is to be released after one last transfer back to his holding facility for processing.
Millar was the only police or corrections officer since at least the start of 2024 that the attorney general’s office had determined was not justified to use deadly force. From the nine times that police officers used deadly force in 2024, the attorney general found that all were legally justified. Police officers have shot six people so far in 2025, and those investigations are ongoing.