Just finished Survivors, I haven't seen this episode in years. It is interesting that Picard says that the Federation has no laws to fit the alien's crime??? So the Federation has no laws against Genocide????? If that is the case, why did Picard has such a tough time in I Borg??? In this episode Picard didn't know if the alien should be commended or punished? TNG was rife with this moral equivalence non-sense from time to time.
-Chris
I may be defining it too narrowly, but I think the term genocide doesn't quite cover the eradication of an entire taxon or species. As I understand it, it only covers groups within a species (ethnic, religious, etc.). What Kevin did is more like an artificially imposed, immediate, galaxy-wide extinction event. Looked at this way, Picard would be technically correct that they had no law to fit the crime because as far as he knew nothing like it had ever occurred before.