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?
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.
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.
Yeah but we aren’t talking heat-of-the-moment shoving someone into traffic during a bar fight, we’re talking heat-of-the-moment naughty thought during an aerial bombardment from a hostile force where his wife was killed.
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?
The dude snapped when he’s loved ones were killed, that is considered exculpatory of violent actions in almost all legal systems. The difference is that instead of a knife or a gun he had almost omnipotent powers of destruction.
In an ideal society he would get psychological counseling to deal with the trauma and ensure it doesn’t happen again, but I think it’s obvious he was a bit above Troi’s pay grade.
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?
Shut up, Wesley! We must be circumspect with those who could visit genocide upon US with a thought. Also, don’t bring up how often I challenged Q when he could have done the same or I’ll just tell you to shut up again.
I mean, I sort of imagine it to be less the “rule on the books” part, and more the “do we actually have the physical capacity to enforce those rules” end of it. They cant really imprison him (I mean while he’s feeling guilty he might stay willingly, but they cant keep him in if he eventually changes his mind, so itd more be him imprisoning himself). Trying to despite the futility of it would seem somewhat dangerous, because again, if he should ever change his mind, you clearly dont want to seem hostile to something with that kind of power, especially when you dont have it. Saying “Our law is not sufficient for you” could just be interpreted as the most diplomatic way given his mental state to justify leaving and not returning.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Item (c) comes the closest to what Sisko did, but he did it in a way that gave them a chance to get out, so it’s not a perfect match. Forcing conditions for removing a group probably wouldn’t qualify under any of these. That said, it can be a factor in Ethnic Cleansing, but the Maquis aren’t really an ethnic group.
If the Federation was in the business of putting higher beings on trial, don’t you think the second they learned Q was human they’d slap him in a courtroom so fast it’d make his head spin?
If these are spoilers you are about 30 years behind.
QTwo that I can remember: Q got temporarily kicked out of the continuum (reference d above), also when Q got banished in the asteroid and Janeway let him out, he became human, then committed suicide.
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