CONFIDENTIAL FORENSIC NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATION¶
| RE: | Victor Amaya |
| DOB: | [redacted in filed copy] / 1986 |
| Examiner: | Aileen Mensah, Ph.D., A.B.P.P. (Clinical Neuropsychology) |
| Referral: | Office of the Public Defender, Post-Conviction and Sentence Modification Division; American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland |
| Matter: | State of Maryland v. Victor Amaya, Case No. C-24-CR-06-018547 (Petition for Resentencing, Md. Code Ann., Crim. Proc. § 8-111) |
| Dates of Examination: | December 18, 2030; January 6, 2031; January 9, 2031 |
| Date of Report: | January 9, 2031 |
I. Referral Question and Scope¶
The undersigned was retained by counsel for the Petitioner to conduct a forensic neuropsychological evaluation of Mr. Victor Amaya in connection with his pending Petition for Resentencing. Counsel requested an assessment of Mr. Amaya’s current cognitive functioning, the nature and origin of any cognitive impairments, and, to the extent such an opinion can be responsibly offered at a remove of nearly twenty-five years, the likely state of his cognitive and adaptive functioning at the time of the offense of June 11, 2006.
This evaluation was conducted across three sessions at the Patuxent Institution Eligible Persons Program. It comprised clinical interview, review of available records, and a battery of standardized instruments selected and, where necessary, modified in administration to accommodate Mr. Amaya’s expressive-language and processing-speed impairments. The records available for review were substantially incomplete, a circumstance addressed in Section VII below and material to the central finding of this report.
II. Records Reviewed¶
- University of Maryland Medical Center records, March 2003: admission for assault-related traumatic brain injury; emergency decompressive craniotomy; acute inpatient course (partial; discharge summary present, much of the inpatient record unavailable).
- Patuxent Institution Eligible Persons Program clinical file, 2007–2030, including treatment notes, programming records, and the institutional Board of Review materials.
- Original trial record and 2007 sentencing transcript, State of Maryland v. Victor Amaya.
- No records of any kind were available from Mr. Amaya’s childhood, education, or any developmental, psychological, or special-education assessment predating the 2003 injury. The absence of these records is itself a finding and is discussed below.
III. Relevant History¶
Mr. Amaya is a forty-four-year-old man of Black American and Salvadoran parentage, raised between Baltimore City and Prince George’s County in a household his records describe as economically precarious and residentially unstable. He is the only child of Ms. Gladys Amaya, who has been the consistent informant for the developmental history obtained in this evaluation, his own recall of early childhood being limited.
By his mother’s account, corroborated by the texture of the few available records, Mr. Amaya was a slow-developing child who reached language and academic milestones late, struggled across every school he attended, was moved frequently between schools as the family relocated, and was never, at any point in his childhood, formally evaluated for a developmental or learning disability. He was, in his mother’s words, a trusting and easily-led child who did not readily distinguish people who meant him well from people who did not. No early-intervention services, special-education designation, or psychological assessment appears ever to have been initiated. The reasons are not obscure: poverty, residential instability, fractured schooling, a primary caregiver working long hours in domestic labor and navigating a second language, and a school system disinclined to expend assessment resources on a transient, low-income child of color. The result is a developmental history that left almost no documentary trace.
In March 2003, at the age of sixteen, Mr. Amaya sustained a severe traumatic brain injury in an assault. He underwent emergency decompressive craniotomy at the University of Maryland Medical Center and survived with permanent neurological sequelae. This injury is the one cognitively significant event in his history that generated a medical record, and it has consequently been treated, by every subsequent system that has encountered him, as the origin of his cognitive impairment. It is the central conclusion of this evaluation that this framing is incomplete and, in a manner directly relevant to the matter before the Court, misleading.
IV. Behavioral Observations¶
Mr. Amaya presented as a cooperative, gentle, and notably unguarded man who engaged with the evaluation to the full extent his impairments allowed. His speech was slow and effortful, marked by mild dysarthria that thickened across the length of each session as he fatigued, and by frequent word-finding pauses during which he would stop, search, and either recover the word or reroute around it. On several occasions, when English failed him under the strain of a difficult item, he produced fragments of Spanish, apparently without awareness of the language shift. His facial expression was markedly reduced in range, consistent with documented bilateral facial-nerve involvement; this flattening should not be mistaken, as the record suggests it has repeatedly been mistaken, for emotional blunting, hostility, or indifference. Observation of his posture, breathing, and motor behavior revealed an emotional life of normal range and responsiveness occurring behind a face that could not display it.
Of particular note was Mr. Amaya’s relationship to the evaluation itself. He was entirely without suspicion of the examiner’s purpose, repeatedly offering information against his own apparent interest with no evident awareness that it might be used against him, and accepting reassurance and instruction at face value. This disposition is clinically relevant and is addressed in Section VI.
V. Tests Administered¶
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Fourth Edition (selected indices, modified administration); Wechsler Memory Scale, Fourth Edition (selected subtests); Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System (selected subtests); Boston Naming Test; tests of processing speed and sustained attention; and a structured assessment of adaptive functioning conducted via interview with the Petitioner and collateral interview with Ms. Gladys Amaya. Administration was modified throughout to accommodate Mr. Amaya’s processing speed and expressive-language impairments; these modifications are detailed in the appended testing record and do not, in the examiner’s judgment, compromise the validity of the qualitative findings, though they limit the precision of standardized scoring.
VI. Findings¶
Two distinct conditions are present, of separate origin, and the distinction is the heart of this report.
A. Intellectual Disability (Developmental; Lifelong)¶
Mr. Amaya meets the diagnostic criteria for a mild-to-moderate intellectual disability of developmental origin: deficits in intellectual functioning and in adaptive functioning, with onset during the developmental period. The collateral developmental history obtained from Ms. Amaya—late milestones, lifelong academic failure predating any injury, a persistent and characterological difficulty distinguishing trustworthy from untrustworthy intent—establishes that these deficits were present long before the 2003 traumatic brain injury. This is not a condition Mr. Amaya acquired. It is a condition he was born with and has lived with his entire life, and which no system charged with his care, education, or prosecution ever identified.
The significance of the absence of childhood records cannot be overstated, and it cuts in only one direction. The lack of any developmental assessment does not indicate the absence of a disability; it indicates the absence of anyone willing to look. A child with this presentation, born into different circumstances, would have been identified in early elementary school. Mr. Amaya was not identified because the systems around him were not configured to identify children like him, and the consequence is a man who reached the criminal-legal system at twenty with a significant developmental disability that had never once been named.
B. Traumatic Brain Injury Sequelae (Acquired; 2003)¶
Superimposed upon the developmental intellectual disability are the permanent sequelae of the 2003 traumatic brain injury: a further reduction in processing speed, executive dysfunction, expressive aphasia, mild dysarthria, post-traumatic seizure disorder, chronic fatigue, and impairment in the capacity to evaluate consequences in real time. These are the impairments the existing record documents, because they are the impairments attached to a hospitalization. They are real, they are permanent, and they are not the whole picture. They are the visible, recorded layer atop an unrecorded foundation.
C. The Combined Picture¶
The interaction of the two conditions is clinically and forensically important. A lifelong intellectual disability characterized, in part, by an impaired capacity to recognize when one is being used, compounded by an acquired injury that further slowed processing and degraded real-time consequence-evaluation, describes a person uniquely vulnerable to precisely the kind of exploitation the record of the underlying offense reflects: a man told to wait in a car, who waited; told a weapon was not real, who believed it; given a task whose criminal character was never made explicit to him, who did not independently perceive it.
VII. Opinion Regarding Functioning at the Time of the Offense¶
Within a reasonable degree of neuropsychological certainty, both conditions described above were present on June 11, 2006. The intellectual disability was, by definition, present, having a developmental origin; the traumatic brain injury had occurred three years prior. Mr. Amaya’s capacity, in June 2006, to appreciate the criminality of conduct presented to him as a routine errand by an individual who held coercive authority over him was, in this examiner’s opinion, substantially impaired by the combination of the two conditions. He retained an abstract understanding that stealing and violence are wrong—a fact that would have satisfied a crude competency inquiry—while lacking the capacity to recognize, in the moment and embedded within a task framed as a favor, that the specific conduct he was participating in was the wrong it was. The distinction between abstract moral knowledge and situated criminal appreciation is precisely the distinction the relevant legal standards draw, and precisely the distinction the 2006 and 2007 proceedings never reached, because the underlying impairments were never assessed.
VIII. Diagnostic Summary¶
- Intellectual Disability, mild-to-moderate, developmental origin, lifelong, previously undiagnosed.
- Major Neurocognitive Disorder due to Traumatic Brain Injury (2003), with expressive aphasia, dysarthria, executive dysfunction, and reduced processing speed.
- Post-Traumatic Seizure Disorder (by history; managed pharmacologically).
- Persistent Depressive presentation (clinical observation; deferred to treating clinicians for formal characterization).
IX. Examiner’s Note¶
What follows is offered outside the formal diagnostic record, in the examiner’s own voice, because the formal record has no place to put it.
I have evaluated Mr. Amaya across three sessions, and the clearest finding I can report is also the one a battery of tests was least necessary to reach. This is a gentle, trusting, significantly disabled man who has been in prison for nearly twenty-five years for a crime he was used to commit and did not understand. Every instrument I administered confirmed what was apparent within the first ten minutes of the first session. The disability that I have, in this report, formally named was nameable at any point in the preceding four decades by anyone who sat with him long enough to look. A teacher could have seen it. A school psychologist, had one ever been engaged, would have seen it in an afternoon. His trial counsel, with a single phone call to an evaluator, would have seen it before the jury was empaneled.
No one looked. That is not a clinical finding. I include it because a report that confined itself to clinical findings would document the disability and omit the catastrophe, and the catastrophe is the part the Court most needs to understand. The system did not fail to treat Mr. Amaya’s disability. It failed, for forty-four years, to perform the act of attention that would have allowed it to be treated at all. I was the first.
_______________________________________ Aileen Mensah, Ph.D., A.B.P.P. Diplomate, American Board of Professional Psychology (Clinical Neuropsychology) January 9, 2031