CONDEMNED
WITHOUT
CAUSE
CONDEMNED
WITHOUT
CAUSE
About the Book
In 2017, a federal court set Stephen free — finding that the Arizona statute that convicted him had violated his right to due process. For four years of brief freedom, he rebuilt the life the state had taken: reunited with his family, working, guilty of nothing. He could have run. Against a 75-year sentence, flight carried little added risk. But Stephen is autistic, and his fundamental belief — that innocent people should trust the system — never allowed him to consider it. He couldn’t have fled any more than he could have lied about a crime he didn’t commit. So when a federal appeals court reversed his release in 2021 on a technicality that had nothing to do with his guilt or innocence, Stephen walked back into federal court on the very day of his mother’s birthday — voluntarily, exactly as the system asked. Condemned Without Cause is Patricia Borden’s account of a twenty-year fight against a system that condemned her son not once, but twice, and the son whose faith in it never wavered, even as it failed him again and again.
This is a mother’s chronicle of that fight — nursing training traded for law libraries, years spent learning the language of appeals, habeas corpus, and the labyrinthine restrictions of AEDPA. It is a story of ineffective assistance of counsel, of burden-shifting statutes, of a neurodivergent defendant whose disability was read as evidence of guilt — and of a mother who never stopped fighting, even after winning, even after losing again.
Justice without mercy isn’t justice at all.
— Patricia Borden
Condemned Without Cause moves beyond one family’s ordeal to examine autism and neurodivergence within the criminal justice system at large — burden-shifting at trial, ineffective assistance of counsel, and a post-conviction process that can take decades to correct what should never have happened in the first place. It is, at its core, a civil rights memoir: an unflinching look at Arizona’s courts and prison system, and an argument for a justice system capable of recognizing difference without punishing it.
Praise
Condemned Without Cause exposes a criminal justice system that treats finality as justice and procedure as a substitute for truth. Patricia Borden tells the story of a system willing to leave constitutional violations uncorrected and claims of innocence unanswered rather than revisit an unjust conviction. Yet this book is ultimately about courage. For twenty years, Borden has fought relentlessly for her son, Stephen May, and for others who remain imprisoned despite serious questions about the integrity of their convictions. Fierce, unflinching, and deeply human, her story is both a warning and a call to action. Anyone who believes that our criminal justice system is designed to protect the innocent and punish only the guilty can learn the horrifying truth about the many ways the system is designed to process cases rather than seek truth and justice. And once you become acquainted with this dark reality, Patricia’s account of Stephen May’s case should propel you to action. This book does not have a happy ending. It only leaves us with the next chapter – to be written by our collective efforts – to obtain Stephen’s freedom and reform a broken system.
Kevin Heade
Public Defender
Reading Patricia’s courageous and heartbreaking book, one wants to leap into the story and scream, “No, stop doing this to Stephen!” But the fact is that what happened to Stephen can happen to anyone with a disability, and this book will help awaken our collective understanding of the challenges and gross miscarriages of justice adults with disabilities face in the criminal legal system. A must-read for any professional, parent, attorney, police officer, and self-advocate.
Nick Dubin, Ph.D.
Psychologist, author, and autism self-advocate with Asperger’s who was himself wrongfully charged
