Genocide requires intent. Whereas this alien just had a fleeting moment of anger at the time of his wife being murdered.
Can he really be tried for genocide? It’s hard to say, but I’d say not. We all have dark intrusive thoughts, and in this instance it had disastrous consequences.
It’s all moot anyway. If you have no means or intention to enforce a law, does it really exist?
The heat-of-passion is something to argue to mitigate culpability. Yes, he killed an entire species, and wasn’t exactly justified, but his emotions and passions were inflamed by the aliens murdering his wife making his actions involuntary.
Genocide requires intent.
Is that actually, legally, true?
In other words, does the word identify the cause, or the effect?
Can he really be tried for genocide? It’s hard to say, but I’d say not.
How so? The facts seem self-evident.
It’s all moot anyway. If you have no means or intention to enforce a law, does it really exist?
You can still classify someone though in such a way, in hopes that in some future time you can enforce the law on them, having being previously judged as a criminal.
We’re talking thinking something, at a moment of extreme stress and anger, after everybody on the planet he lived on was killed, including his wife.
We aren’t talking someone physically doing something.
You’ve never had any intrusive thought, ever? Can you affirm that you wouldn’t have an angry thought even if everybody on Earth was murdered, including loved ones?
Yea, but genocide is like way to much paperwork
Genocide is systematic.
This was instantaneous.
To be fair Janeway wasn’t around at the time, so they didn’t have any examples of genocide to go off of.
He just made it uninhabitable by humans. Not exactly the same as wiping it out, but since it forced displacement of a whole planet, it was genocide.
This guy wiped out an entire race with a thought and your plan is to do what exactly?
It’s like that scene in “The Dark Knight”
Lucius Fox : Let me get this straight, you think that your client, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante, who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands, and your plan is to blackmail this person?
[Reese’s face falls and Fox smiles]
Lucius Fox : Good luck.
Q would have said,
“Oh the Husnock? Horrible, simply horrible species. Good riddance. Did you ask me here to give Uxbridge a medal or something? Because he certainly doesn’t deserve it! Why I’ve already genocided three species this morning and didn’t even get a thank you.”
