Posted on

Gross Overreaction Still Haunts Kiera Wilmot

A year ago, I wrote about Kiera Wilmot, a student at Bartow (Florida) High School who was expelled and criminally charged for setting off an explosive after her science class volcano experiment backfired.

Mood music:

The trumped-up charges were eventually dropped, but Wilmot’s brush with the law continues to haunt her. According to civil liberties site Police State USA, the charges continue to taint Kiera’s record and impede her chances for success.

“All my charges have been dropped, but the lawyer says that it takes 5 years to clear each felony off the record,” Wilmot told the publication. She wants to be an engineer “building robots that can do tasks like surgeries or driving cars.” Here’s a young woman who was an honor student with no record of trouble. The principal described her as a “good kid” before expelling her anyway because he felt bound by the school’s zero-tolerance policy.

Suspending her might have been justified, but expelling her was over the top. The law slapping her with criminal charges for so obvious a mistake was shameful.

These are the incidents that make me lose faith in our institutions of education and law enforcement. The fear that has taken root in the aftermath of 9-11 and various school shootings has turned officials into overreactionary fools.

The year Wilmot has endured is tragic. Parties involved should atone for the injustice by helping the teen get back on her feet. I doubt they will, though. That would involve an admission of wrongdoing.

I suspect that Wilmot will achieve her dreams with hard work and determination, with no thanks to the society that should have supported her.

Kiera Wilmot

Posted on

Kiera Wilmot Case: Proof We’ve Gone Off the Deep End

You want an example of how fear has pushed society off the deep end? Check out the case of 16-year-old Kiera Wilmot.

A student of Bartow High School in Florida, Wilmot did something worthy at least a few weeks of after-school detention: She mixed a few chemicals together in the science lab and caused a small explosion. But she had no sinister intent. She was being a curious teen, doing something stupid and reckless.

Now she faces criminal charges and has been expelled from school. There was no damage and nobody was hurt, but she’s being treated like a terrorist.

Florida’s WTSP News 10 reports that Wilmot was charged with “possession/discharge of a weapon on school property and discharging a destructive device,” both felonies. According to WTSP, Wilmot has been expelled. She will need to finish high school through an explusion program

By all accounts, Wilmot has been a good, well-behaved student who gets good grades. But because she did something stupid in a society overfilled with fear, the authorities want to make a convicted felon of her.

Back when I was in high school, we made stupid decisions all the time. We threw rocks through windows. We pulled fire alarms and ran. We set off stink bombs. When caught, we were punished, as we deserved to be. But the police and bomb squad weren’t called in, as they are today.

Wilmot did wrong, intentionally or not. She deserves some kind of punishment. But felony charges? That’s way over the line. It illustrates how easily we overreact these days whenever something goes boom.

Kiera Wilmot