At least 155 people have died in custody in New Hampshire

How deaths in custody are reported in New Hampshire

The New Hampshire Department of Corrections runs three adult prisons, the New Hampshire State Prison for Men in Concord, the Northern New Hampshire Correctional Facility in Berlin and the New Hampshire Correctional Facility for Women, along with three transitional housing units and a transitional work center.¹ It also runs the Secure Psychiatric Unit, a separate facility on the grounds of the men's prison in Concord where people are held for involuntary psychiatric treatment, some of them under civil commitment rather than a prison sentence.²³ State law makes every death in legal custody, including any death in a prison, a case for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.⁴ When someone dies in a state prison, the department notifies the Office of the Attorney General and the county attorney, the medical examiner performs an autopsy, and deaths the department calls untimely are investigated with the New Hampshire State Police.⁵⁶

The department announces some deaths in press releases. The first release may give no name; a later update may name the person and give the medical examiner's cause of death.⁵⁷ It does not publish a list of the people who die in its custody or a yearly count of deaths, and I have found no state publication of either.

County jails are run by county departments of corrections, whose superintendents are appointed by and answer to the county commissioners. The only inspection the county corrections law requires is by the commissioners themselves, every six months, with a written report to the Attorney General; the law says nothing about reporting deaths.⁸ Hillsborough County runs the Valley Street jail in Manchester.⁹ The Strafford County jail in Dover is the only state or local facility in New Hampshire that holds people for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under a decades-old agreement; it held 113 people for ICE in February 2025.¹⁰ ICE publishes its own report on each death in its custody.¹¹ The federal Bureau of Prisons runs FCI Berlin, and deaths there are counted by the Bureau, not the state.¹²

For the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, the Grants Management Unit of the New Hampshire Department of Justice emails a reporting form each quarter to the Department of Corrections and to the county departments of corrections in Cheshire, Grafton, Merrimack, Rockingham, Strafford and Sullivan counties, asking for the name, age, race and circumstances of anyone who died, or an "Affirmative No" if no one did. The plan names no contact at Hillsborough County, at any police department, or at the Sununu Youth Services Center in Manchester, the state's facility for detained youth. Deaths involving police are taken from the Attorney General's press releases. Missing details are filled in from Google searches for obituaries and news, and from the state's vital records system.¹³¹⁴ I have found no state publication of these quarterly reports.

What has changed

1. 1939In July, New Hampshire hanged Howard Long, its last execution. The state executed 24 people before 1976 by one count on the Death Penalty Information Center's page and 26 by another.¹⁵
2. 2008Kevin McEvoy, 24, died on August 25 at the Valley Street jail of severe dehydration and kidney failure from protracted vomiting during heroin withdrawal, about five days after he arrived. The medical examiner ruled the death an accident. Hillsborough County settled his family's lawsuit in 2011 for $450,000, a figure that became public only in 2013.¹⁶
3. 2017Phillip Borcuk died on December 6 at the Secure Psychiatric Unit after officers used a Taser on him, held him face down in handcuffs and strapped him face down to a stretcher. The Chief Medical Examiner ruled the death an accident caused by "excited delirium syndrome." His family's wrongful death suit ended in 2024 with a settlement of about $4,000 and no admission of wrongdoing.³
4. 2019Nicholas Sacco, 24, died at the Valley Street jail in May of complications of opiate withdrawal, shortly before he was due to be released. His family's lawsuit said staff ignored his withdrawal and did not follow their own detox policies.⁹ In 2022 the county's insurer paid $875,000 to settle, under terms that bar his family from disparaging the jail.¹⁷
5. 2019On May 30, the legislature repealed the death penalty by overriding the governor's veto. The repeal did not apply to the one person already sentenced to death.¹⁵
6. 2020-2022At the end of 2020, a COVID-19 outbreak at the State Prison for Men in Concord caused its first death; 184 incarcerated people and 58 staff there had tested positive.¹⁸ By January 2022, the UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project counted three COVID-19 deaths in the state's prisons.¹⁹
7. 2023James Dale, 65, died in February after another man assaulted him at the Northern New Hampshire Correctional Facility in Berlin; the Attorney General's office investigated.²⁰
8. 2023Jason Rothe, 50, died on April 29 after a struggle with several corrections officers at the Secure Psychiatric Unit, where he had been sent under civil commitment.²¹³ The Attorney General and the State Police investigated, and the department put the officers involved on leave.² The deputy chief medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, by asphyxia from being held face down with pressure on his back. The department later moved two of the officers to civilian jobs.³
9. 2023In June, the New Hampshire Department of Justice adopted its plan for reporting deaths in custody to the federal government, collecting them by email from the state prisons and six county jails.¹³
10. 2024After the two deaths at the Secure Psychiatric Unit, the department said it had updated its use-of-force policy, added body cameras and an upright restraint device, and trained officers on the risks of face-down restraint.³
11. 2025The number of people held for ICE at the Strafford County jail rose again: a daily average of 28 in 2022 and 84 in 2024, and 113 people on one day in February 2025.¹⁰

How far the official numbers can be trusted

The only official yearly counts are federal. The department reported 127 deaths in state prisons to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2001 through 2019, between 2 and 10 a year, and none of them homicides.²² The department's own list of deaths for 2015 through 2021, obtained by the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, gives no names and does not match: for each year from 2016 through 2019 it has one more death than the federal count, 10 against 9 in 2016, 6 against 5 in 2017, and 9 against 8 in 2018 and 2019.²³²²

That list counts deaths only at the State Prison for Men and the Northern New Hampshire Correctional Facility. It has no deaths at the Secure Psychiatric Unit, and Phillip Borcuk's death there on December 6, 2017 does not appear on it.²³³

A cause of death can also change how a death is counted. The federal record of no prison homicides ended in 2023, when one man died after an assault and the medical examiner ruled Jason Rothe's death a homicide.²⁰³ Phillip Borcuk's death, after a similar face-down restraint, was ruled an accident caused by "excited delirium," a diagnosis major medical organizations have since rejected; most of the forensic pathologists New Hampshire Public Radio consulted thought the restraint played some part.³

No state agency publishes a count of deaths in county jails. The federal reporting plan relies on jails answering a quarterly email, leaves Hillsborough County's jail off its contact list, and fills gaps with web searches.¹³ What is known about deaths at the Valley Street jail comes largely from lawsuits, and at least one settlement bars the family from speaking ill of the jail.¹⁶¹⁷