By Justin Fenton
The Baltimore Sun
BALTIMORE — A U.S. district judge has dismissed charges against a Baltimore County volunteer firefighter who was accused of deliberately setting a 2007 blaze in Halethorpe, accepting his lawyer’s argument that the federal court did not have jurisdiction.
Authorities had alleged that Nicholas Hannigan, 27, a former deputy chief with the English Consul department, told federal investigators in 2011 that he set a fire that destroyed a home on Myrtle Avenue. Hannigan had made the disclosure during an interview to become a Secret Service agent, they said.
In order to prove charges of malicious destruction of property in federal court, prosecutors had to show that the home had been “used in interstate or foreign commerce or in any activity affecting interstate or foreign commerce.”
Hannigan’s attorney, Patrick Kent, successfully sought dismissal of the indictment, arguing in March that the home was vacant at the time of the fire and “never entered the stream of commerce as a rental unit and could ... [not] have anyway been used in an activity affecting interstate commerce.”
U.S. District Judge George Levi Russell III accepted the defense argument and dismissed the case Monday, as Hannigan’s trial was scheduled to begin.
Prosecutors did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
The owner had purchased the home June 1, 2007, exactly three months before the fire, and was performing renovations that were expected to be completed during the next year.
The home “at the time of the fire was simply not capable of habitation let alone rental,” Kent wrote in a motion to dismiss. “Since it is uncontested that the property never entered the stream of commerce as a functional rental unit, there is simply no jurisdictional basis for the government to continue with the prosecution in the above captioned case.”
Prosecutors responded that the owner had taken “definitive steps to rent the property out, to include, but not limited to, purchasing the property as an investment property, insuring the property as a rental property, and making substantial renovations to the property.” They said the owner’s intention to rent the property “satisfies the interstate commerce nexus requirement” of the federal statute.
According to authorities, Hannigan said the fire had been set by igniting a wheelbarrow full of insulation.
He also allegedly described setting the fire as a rite of passage of sorts for volunteers, saying another member told him he “should have lit a fire by now to be like everyone else.”
A representative of the English Consul board of directors previously called the claim a “ridiculous accusation.”
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