Kiera Wilmot was charged with two felonies, for popping the top off a water bottle.

[redqueen]

27. Your evidence that it was a "prank"?

I appreciate the concern over drano bombs (not panic, not overreaction), they can be dangerous and that's something to be concerned about.

This is a good student. She is not a troublemaker. Labeling this a "prank" is bullshit.

...

My Twitter feed is going crazy because of course it mostly contains scientists, and there are few of us scientists who did not play with fire or chemicals growing up, because we were curious to see what would happen. And we knew it wasn't entirely safe and that our parents wouldn't want us to blow things up, so we often did it when parents weren't around. Mom, don't read the following sentence: I set lots of fires in our backyard in Dallas and tried burning all kinds of different stuff because I wanted to see what would happen. Seeing matter transform before our eyes is magical. It's unfortunate but true that it's easier to explore this kind of transformation in destructive ways (burning things, disassembling previously perfectly functioning machines) than in constructive ways -- you have to take things apart before you can learn how to build things. Although this was the first I'd heard of them, so-called "Drano bombs" are evidently popular with kids, most of whom presumably want to just make something blow up, though they have sometimes been used for pranks, with potentially dangerous consequences. A blogger named Southern Fried Scientist has assembled stories of scientists blowing things up as kids, and others have pointed out that neuroscientist Cornelia Bargmann, who will be leading President Obama's much balyhooed brain-mapping project, tells a harrowing childhood story of her and friends stealing sodium metal from her chemistry laboratory and blowing a toilet off the wall while in high school.

I have complicated feelings about these stories, because I know that this kind of self-driven inquisitive drive to find out how things work is at the root of what makes good scientists. Yet, as a parent of two young girls, I have concerns about children playing with things that go boom without sufficient thought for the consequences. (Please, please, find some other way of satisfying your curiosity than throwing a lump of sodium metal into a toilet....)

There's a lot that is still not known about the specific incident at Bartow High School, primarily because (as far as I can tell) neither Kiera nor her parents have made any public statements, so we do not have her side of the story. On the face of it, the punishment appears to be insanely out of proportion to the crime. She is being expelled from school because of a zero-tolerance policy that prevents the school principal from applying any discretion in the case. And then she is, totally inexplicably, being charged as an adult with violent felonies by a state attorney. For context, the same state attorney, just days later, did not charge another teen with any crime after that child accidentally killed his own brother. Glotfelty described that event, accurately in my opinion, as a "tragic accident." Pressing charges would not bring the dead child back to life, and the surviving brother's personal horror is only beginning. Kiera's experiment was stupid but not tragic, causing no harm to anyone or anything. It was also, according to one retired lawyer, likely not a crime, due to Kiera's evident lack of violent intent and the fact that the device was likely not actually destructive. She deserves punishment and needs to consider what might have happened, but such punishment can be accomplished within family and school. Why charge her with a crime at all, and why charge her as an adult? It's senseless. Lack of discretion got her expelled, too much discretion got her formally charged.

One question that a lot of people are asking is: why did she do this at school? We don't know, because Kiera and her family haven't spoken publicly. There could be lots of different reasons. In her place I might have pulled something similar at school because I thought my friends would think it was cool. Except I wouldn't have done it unsupervised, because I had awesome science teachers who I talked to a lot, and they would've said, if you want to do that experiment before school, fine, but let's do it safely under the fume hood and talk about what reaction is taking place here, okay? Ooh, and then maybe we can trap that hydrogen gas that's being evolved and then you'll really get to see something explode. Kiera either did not seek out, or did not have access to, such guidance for her curiosity, we don't know which; all we know is that it was the bad choice to pick an unsupervised spot at school for the place that she would test what would happen when she mixed drain cleaner and aluminum foil that has landed her in so much trouble.

As a teen I did things as stupid as what Kiera did, as did most of the scientists on my Twitter feed. I've even been arrested for things much more stupid than what Kiera did (misdemeanor theft, shoplifting when I was 14 or 15, if you must know; I was sentenced to a weekly sort of community group therapy). For some reason, nobody charged me with felonies as an adult when I did those things. Adults' responses to my stupid actions were always geared toward shaping me into a better and more productive member of society. It is hard to avoid the supposition that the reason for this disparity is racial -- Kiera is African-American, and of course, I'm white. There is plenty of evidence for a racial disparity in the enforcement of school discipline.

...

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2013/05031012-thoughts-on-kiera-wilmot.html