HONOLULU — An 82-year-old Hawaii landowner pleaded not guilty to manslaughter Tuesday in the deaths of seven people swept from their homes after a century-old earthen dam broke on his property upstream.

James Pflueger, who is free on $71,000 bail and recovering from heart surgery, entered the plea via video linkup to Circuit Judge Randal Valenciano's courtroom. His trial on seven counts of manslaughter and one count of reckless endangerment is set for June 15.

Defense attorney William McCorriston says the state, facing lawsuits in the March 2006 dam break, is trying to make Pflueger a scapegoat and doesn't want to admit its own liability.

One of the accusations against Pflueger is that the dam's emergency spillway _ designed to keep water from flowing over the dam _ had been covered. Pflueger has repeatedly denied that he had the spillway filled.

An independent investigator has concluded the overflowing of the rain-swollen dam was likely responsible for the break, and that the lack of a spillway caused or contributed to the failure.

Prosecutors said earth was moved into the spillway in 1997, apparently to create flat building sites around the dam.

McCorriston said the dam actually gave way from the bottom and the spillway had nothing to do with the failure. "After the dam reaches about the age of Kaloko, you can have catastrophic failure from the bottom by the bedrock weathering ... That's what happened," he said.

McCorriston also said the grand jury that indicted Pflueger in November never was presented with a letter Pflueger sent to the state Department of Land and Natural Resources to authorize it to inspect the dam.

The state in the 1980s had classified the dam as "low hazard" to cause loss of life if it failed, and McCorriston said the state never made an effort to revisit that classification.

State Attorney General Mark Bennett responded by saying he will try the case in front of a jury of Kauai citizens, not in the press. He also said his office has done nothing improper in this case.