Even as the deaf community debates whether South Dakota defendant Daphne Wright should have been tried by deaf jurors (there's an example here), the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled today that a prosecutor could lawfully strike blind jurors because of their disability.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in Batson v. Kentucky and later cases that prosecutors couldn't use race or gender as a reason to strike jurors. In today's opinion, the D.C. Circuit held that Supreme Court precedent didn't require it to extend the rule to disabled jurors (I've omitted citations):
The Equal Protection Clause affords a prospective juror a right not to be excluded from a particular jury on the basis of race or gender, because discrimination on these grounds strikes at the "core guarantee of equal protecton," and is rarely justifiable. By contrast, the Supreme Court has declined to treat the disabled as a suspect class in recognition of the reality that the States may have legitimate reasons for treating differently persons whose disabilities reduce their ability to perform certain functions.
The case is United States v. Watson.
