Cite as: 505 U. S. 437 (1992)
Blackmun, J., dissenting
ess right. I part company with the Court today, because I believe the answer to that question is in the affirmative.
II
As an initial matter, I believe the Court's approach to this case effectively asks and answers the wrong doctrinal question. Following the lead of the parties, the Court mistakenly frames its inquiry in terms of whether to apply a standard it takes to be derived from language in Patterson v. New York, 432 U. S. 197 (1977), or a standard based on the functional balancing approach of Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U. S. 319 (1976). Ante, at 442-446. The Court is not put to such a choice. Under Drope and Pate, it need decide only whether a procedure imposing the burden of proof upon the defendant is "adequate" to protect the constitutional prohibition against trial of incompetent persons.
The Court, however, chooses the Patterson path, announcing that there is no violation of due process unless placing the burden of proof of incompetency upon the defendant " ' "offends some principle of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental." ' " Ante, at 445 (quoting Patterson, 432 U. S., at 202). Separating the primary right (the right not to be tried while incompetent) from the subsidiary right (the right not to bear the burden of proof of incompetency), the Court acknowledges the primary right to be fundamental in "our common-law heritage," but determines the subsidiary right to be without a "settled tradition" deserving of constitutional protection. Ante, at 446. This approach is mistaken, because it severs two integrally related procedural rights that cannot be examined meaningfully in isolation. The protections of the Due Process Clause, to borrow the second Justice Harlan's words, are simply not "a series of isolated points pricked" out in terms of their most specific level of historic generality. Poe v. Ullman, 367 U. S. 497, 543 (1961) (dissenting opinion). Had the Court taken the same historical-
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