Cite as: 526 U. S. 227 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
choice over characterizing a stated fact as an element would leave the State substantially free to manipulate its way out of Winship, 421 U. S., at 698.
Two Terms later, in Patterson v. New York, supra, the Court ruled on a Winship challenge to a scheme defining murder as causing death with intent, subject to an affirmative defense of extreme emotional disturbance for which there was a reasonable explanation. 432 U. S., at 205-206. Unlike Maine's law, New York's raised no presumption of malice; malice was omitted from the elements of murder. Patterson contended that because the presence or absence of an extreme emotional disturbance affected the severity of sentence, Winship and Mullaney required the State to prove the absence of that fact beyond a reasonable doubt. We rejected this argument and "decline[d] to adopt as a constitutional imperative . . . that a State must disprove beyond a reasonable doubt every fact constituting any and all affirmative defenses related to the culpability of an accused." 432 U. S., at 210. We identified the use of a presumption to establish an essential ingredient of the offense as the curse of the Maine law, because the "shifting of the burden of persuasion with respect to a fact which the State deems so important that it must be either proved or presumed is impermissible under the Due Process Clause." Id., at 215. With one caveat, therefore, Patterson left the States free to choose the elements that define their crimes, without any impediment from Winship. The caveat was a stated recognition of some limit upon state authority to reallocate the traditional burden of proof, 432 U. S., at 210, which in that case was easily satisfied by the fact that "at common law the burden of proving" the mitigating circumstances of severe emotional disturbance "rested on the defendant." Id., at 202; see also id., at 211; Mullaney, supra, at 693-694. While a narrow reading of this limit might have been no more than a ban on using presumptions to reduce elements to the point of being nominal, a broader reading was equally open, that the State
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