Cite as: 518 U. S. 37 (1996)
Opinion of Scalia, J.
mens rea. Treating the matter as one of excluding misleading evidence therefore makes some sense.5
In sum, not every widespread experiment with a procedural rule favorable to criminal defendants establishes a fundamental principle of justice. Although the rule allowing a jury to consider evidence of a defendant's voluntary intoxication where relevant to mens rea has gained considerable acceptance, it is of too recent vintage, and has not received sufficiently uniform and permanent allegiance, to qualify as fundamental, especially since it displaces a lengthy common-law tradition which remains supported by valid justifications today.6
III
The Supreme Court of Montana's conclusion that Mont. Code Ann. § 45-2-203 (1995) violates the Due Process Clause purported to rest on two lines of our jurisprudence. First,
5 These many valid policy reasons for excluding evidence of voluntary intoxication refute Justice O'Connor's claim that § 45-2-203 has no purpose other than to improve the State's likelihood of winning a conviction, see post, at 66-67, 72-73. Such a claim is no more accurate as applied to this provision than it would have been as applied to the New York law in Patterson v. New York, 432 U. S. 197 (1977), which placed upon the defendant the burden of proving the affirmative defense of extreme emotional disturbance. We upheld that New York law, even though we found it "very likely true that fewer convictions of murder would occur if New York were required to negative the affirmative defense at issue here." Id., at 209. Here, as in Patterson, any increase in the chance of obtaining a conviction is merely a consequence of pursuing legitimate penological goals.
6 Justice O'Connor maintains that "to determine whether a fundamental principle of justice has been violated here, we cannot consider only the historical disallowance of intoxication evidence, but must also consider the 'fundamental principle' that a defendant has a right to a fair opportunity to put forward his defense." Post, at 71. What Justice O'Connor overlooks, however, is that the historical disallowance of intoxication evidence sheds light upon what our society has understood by a "fair opportunity to put forward [a] defense." That "fundamental principle" has demonstrably not included the right to introduce intoxication evidence.
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