“Michael Bryant Jr. choked, bit, beat, kicked, pulled hair, threw women to the floor and hit them over the head with a bottle,” according to a report in the Billings Gazette. Bryant, a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe in Montana, has been convicted at least five times of domestic assault in tribal courts. And now the Supreme Court is going to put him away for a long time.

This case is “illustrative of the domestic violence problem existing in Indian country.” That was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg writing for the majority in the court’s ruling on Bryant handed down last month. In an 8-0 decision, Ginsburg and her colleagues decided that a defendant can be sentenced under federal guidelines as a repeat offender (three strikes and you’re eligible for federal prison time) even if he did not have access to a lawyer during the initial tribal proceedings. Bryant is probably some kind of sociopath and deserves a harsh sentence, but the court’s ruling is only masking a much bigger problem with justice on Indian reservations.

Bryant argued that his Sixth Amendment rights were violated by the federal conviction. Essentially he was being charged with a federal crime based on prior convictions even though those trials didn’t meet constitutional standards. The Supreme Court has held that convictions in federal or state courts obtained without the advice of counsel cannot then be used to obtain a conviction of another federal crime. But the standards are different in Indian country.

Oddly, this ruling has been hailed as a victory for tribal sovereignty because it allows Indian courts to continue to make their own rules of law and evidence, regardless of federal or state statutes. But actually it’s pretty shocking that Native Americans who are American citizens can be tried this way. As the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers pointed out in a letter warning the House of Representatives against expanding tribal powers, many tribes “do not make the code of laws publicly available” and “have no rules for discovery by the defendants of evidence against them.” And many tribes don’t provide defendants with a lawyer to represent them at trial.

By continuing to allow these tribal courts to operate by a different set of rules, and even placing a federal stamp of approval on their rulings, the Supreme Court is making matters worse for Indian victims of violence (sexual and otherwise) and making the process less fair and transparent for Indian defendants.

Justice Ginsburg is correct that the rates of domestic violence on reservations are deplorable. And it’s not just domestic. Native American women report being raped two-and-a-half times as often as the US average. The rate of child abuse among Native Americans is twice as high as the national average. What’s more, each of these problems is statistically worse when the results are restricted to Native Americans who live on reservations.

‘By continuing to allow these tribal courts to operate by a different set of rules… the Supreme Court is making matters worse for Indian victims of violence.’

In a 2007 story on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in the Dakotas, doctors told NPR they saw rape and sexual assault victims “several times a month” but they were almost never called to testify in court. And authorities rarely break out a rape kit when a woman reports a rape. Sometimes tribes don’t have the resources to pursue every complaint. Sometimes there are overlapping state, federal and tribal jurisdictional issues.

And sometimes there is an effort to cover over problems. In 2012, Michael R. Tilus, director of behavioral health at the Spirit Lake Health Center, e-mailed state and federal health officials about what he saw as the “epidemic” of abuse on the Spirit Lake reservation. Tilus, who had worked for the Public Health Service for 10 years, was actually reprimanded for sending the e-mail. His superiors at the clinic at Spirit Lake accused him of “engaging in action and behavior of a dishonorable nature” because he hadn’t gone through the proper channels to register his complaint. They rescinded his promotion and transferred him to another position.

Joni Renbarger, who has worked as a psychologist for the Shoshone tribe as well as for Indian Health Services, says the “tribal departments of social services are incompetent, and there is not good oversight from the state level or from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.” She believes that the court systems are part of the problem. “They don’t have the same standards as state courts.” She has regularly seen cases in which judges are related to the families whose cases they’re deciding.

The justice system on many reservations is a disaster thanks to our desire to respect “tribal sovereignty.” If we wanted to protect the victims of these crimes and ensure that the defendants have the same rights to a fair trial as all other American citizens, we would remake the Indian court system entirely. The Supreme Court has rightly shone a light on the problem of domestic violence on reservations, but their solution is no solution at all.

Naomi Schaefer Riley’s book “The New Trail of Tears: How Washington is Destroying American Indians” is out this month.