Last Tuesday the Supreme Court announced its decision, in the case of Roper v. Simmons, to abolish the death penalty for juvenile offenders. In the court’s ruling, Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Sacramento native, observed that the United States was the last country in the world to allow for juvenile offenders to be executed and that a “consensus” among the states had been reached, as thirty already ban the practice.

While I agree with the ends of the decision, that juveniles should not be executed for their crimes, I have serious misgivings regarding the means used and precedent set by the case for deciding the legality or rightness of other practices in the future.

Under this ruling, the court appears to abdicate, in part, its hallowed position as the sole branch of the federal government not beholden to public opinion. When the Supreme Court espouses a position regarding a criminal case or the legality of a statute, its decisions must be based upon the Constitution and other legal precedent. To base a decision on the logic, “because most people agree with us this way,” is to totally ignore the unique role of the court in protecting the rights of minorities against the tyranny of the majority.

Take a hypothetical example: A rash of violent crimes somehow involving ketchup grips the nation. Municipalities and eventually groups of states begin passing laws restricting the sale and use of ketchup. Shares of Heinz plummet on the New York Stock Exchange. Desperate, a group of ketchup enthusiasts appeals a case to the Supreme Court, rightly arguing that ketchup in and of itself does not pose a public safety risk. The Supreme Court, based on the case it has just decided, would have to rule against the ketchup lovers if it found that a national consensus had been reached, indicating that ketchup is indeed a deplorable substance worthy of severe legal restrictions.

Ridiculous, I know. But if we replace “ketchup” with abortion, gay marriage, curtailing civil liberties, automatic weapons, capital punishment as a whole, or any other hot-button issue, we find a more sobering outcome. One of the fundamental checks and balances in our system of government has been discarded. If such logic holds the power of precedent, the court will be unable to protect minority groups from oppression by the force of a majority. It will instead become beholden to public opinion and the whims of legislative bodies around the country.

The Supreme Court acted rightly in removing juveniles from death rows across the nation. None deserved such a sentence, regardless of the circumstances. But the reasoning the justices used was deeply flawed. If instead the courts opinion focused more strongly on the obvious and entrenched flaws in the administration of capital punishment, the outcome would have been less troubling.

The system by which we condemn and kill the most troubled people in our society is nightmarishly unjust. Since the reintroduction of the death penalty in 1976, more than 100 wrongly convicted and condemned inmates have been freed from death rows in the United States, with nearly a third of them released in the last four years. Studies routinely find that African-Americans are far more likely than defendants of other races to receive the death penalty for the same crimes. This practice hardly suits the “equal protection under law” guaranteed to all in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.

For us to stand idly by while our government continues to execute criminals is to make ourselves party to this injustice. The Supreme Court justices came to the right conclusion in banning juvenile executions, but let’s hope that in taking this step, they have not led us into a deeper moral abyss.

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Sean Catanese can be reached at [email protected]