344
Opinion of the Court
respondent argues that the right to present a defense includes the right to have the jury consider it, and that confusing instructions on state law which prevent a jury from considering an affirmative defense therefore violate due process.2 But such an expansive reading of our cases would make a nullity of the rule reaffirmed in Estelle v. McGuire, supra, that instructional errors of state law generally may not form the basis for federal habeas relief. And the level of generality at which respondent invokes this line of cases is far too great to provide any meaningful guidance for purposes of our Teague inquiry. See Saffle v. Parks, 494 U. S., at 491.
For the foregoing reasons, we disagree with the Seventh Circuit and respondent that our precedent foreordained the result in Falconer, and therefore hold that the rule announced in Falconer is "new" within the meaning of Teague.3
2 Respondent also relies on Cool v. United States, 409 U. S. 100 (1972) (per curiam). That case involved a due process challenge to an instruction that the jury should disregard defense testimony unless it believed beyond a reasonable doubt that the testimony was true. Relying on In re Winship, 397 U. S. 358 (1970), and Washington v. Texas, 388 U. S. 14 (1967), we held that this instruction required reversal of the defendant's conviction because it "place[d] an improper burden on the defense and allow[ed] the jury to convict despite its failure to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt." 409 U. S., at 102-103. This, in turn, we emphasized, contravened Winship's command that the State must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. 409 U. S., at 104. Cool is a progeny of Winship, and therefore provides no predicate under Teague for the rule announced in Falconer.
3 Strongly fortifying this conclusion is the fact that the instructions deemed unconstitutional in Falconer were modeled after, and virtually identical to, the Illinois pattern jury instructions on murder and voluntary manslaughter, which were formally adopted in 1981—five years before respondent's trial—but on which Illinois judges had relied since 1961. As we have stated, the purpose of Teague's "new rule" principle is to "validat[e] reasonable, good-faith interpretations of existing precedents made by state courts." Butler v. McKellar, 494 U. S. 407, 414 (1990). The existence of such an institutionalized state practice over a period of years is
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