Cite as: 523 U. S. 303 (1998)
Opinion of the Court
lateral, a per se rule prohibiting its admission is not an arbitrary or disproportionate means of avoiding it.11
D
The three of our precedents upon which the Court of Appeals principally relied, Rock v. Arkansas, Washington v. Texas, and Chambers v. Mississippi, do not support a right to introduce polygraph evidence, even in very narrow circumstances. The exclusions of evidence that we declared unconstitutional in those cases significantly undermined fundamental elements of the defendant's defense. Such is not the case here.
In Rock, the defendant, accused of a killing to which she was the only eyewitness, was allegedly able to remember the facts of the killing only after having her memory hypnotically refreshed. See Rock v. Arkansas, 483 U. S., at 46. Because Arkansas excluded all hypnotically refreshed testimony, the defendant was unable to testify about certain relevant facts, including whether the killing had been accidental. See id., at 47-49. In holding that the exclusion of this evidence violated the defendant's "right to present a defense," we noted that the rule deprived the jury of the testimony of the only witness who was at the scene and had firsthand knowledge of the facts. See id., at 57. Moreover, the rule infringed upon the defendant's interest in testifying in her own defense--an interest that we deemed particularly significant, as it is the defendant who is the target of any crimi-11 Although the Court of Appeals stated that it had "merely remove[d] the obstacle of the per se rule against admissibility" of polygraph evidence in cases where the accused wishes to proffer an exculpatory polygraph to rebut an attack on his credibility, 44 M. J. 442, 446 (1996), and respondent thus implicitly argues that the Constitution would require collateral litigation only in such cases, we cannot see a principled justification whereby a right derived from the Constitution could be so narrowly contained.
315
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