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Opinion of the Court
nal prosecution. See id., at 52. For this reason, we stated that a defendant ought to be allowed "to present his own version of events in his own words." Ibid.
In Washington, the statutes involved prevented co-defendants or coparticipants in a crime from testifying for one another and thus precluded the defendant from introducing his accomplice's testimony that the accomplice had in fact committed the crime. See Washington v. Texas, 388 U. S., at 16-17. In reversing Washington's conviction, we held that the Sixth Amendment was violated because "the State arbitrarily denied [the defendant] the right to put on the stand a witness who was physically and mentally capable of testifying to events that he had personally observed." Id., at 23.12
In Chambers, we found a due process violation in the combined application of Mississippi's common-law "voucher rule," which prevented a party from impeaching his own witness, and its hearsay rule that excluded the testimony of three persons to whom that witness had confessed. See Chambers v. Mississippi, 410 U. S., at 302. Chambers specifically confined its holding to the "facts and circumstances" presented in that case; we thus stressed that the ruling did not "signal any diminution in the respect traditionally accorded to the States in the establishment and implementation of their own criminal trial rules and procedures." Id., at 302-303. Chambers therefore does not stand for the proposition that the defendant is denied a fair opportunity to defend himself whenever a state or federal rule excludes favorable evidence.
Rock, Washington, and Chambers do not require that Rule 707 be invalidated, because, unlike the evidentiary rules at issue in those cases, Rule 707 does not implicate any signifi-12 In addition, we noted that the State of Texas could advance no legitimate interests in support of the evidentiary rules at issue, and those rules burdened only the defense and not the prosecution. See 388 U. S., at 22- 23. Rule 707 suffers from neither of these defects.
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