First Biden Judge With Disclosed Disability to Join Trial Court

Seattle trial lawyer Jamal Whitehead, the first Biden judicial nominee with a disclosed disability, was confirmed on Tuesday with bipartisan support to a seat on the US District Court for the Western District of Washington.

Whitehead, who uses a prosthetic leg, will be one of only a handful of the 870 life-tenured federal judges open about living with a disability. A quarter of US adults have a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Adding more judges with disabilities and promoting disclosure would help courts become more reflective of the US population and add an important perspective to cases, advocates and judges said. Doing so, however, can be difficult when disability isn’t something judges and lawyers report.

The National Employment Lawyer Association praised Whitehead’s nomination in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying he would bring both a “depth of experience on employment matters” and “much-needed demographic diversity” to the Seattle-based court as “a Black man with a disability.”

The Democratic-led Senate confirmed Whitehead, 51-43. Republicans Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Susan Collins of Maine supported confirmation.

Whitehead, who was born in 1979, graduated from the University of Washington and the Seattle University School of Law. He started his legal career as an associate at a Seattle law firm. He was a trial attorney in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Seattle field office before jumping to the local US attorney’s office.

Since 2016, Whitehead has worked at Schroeter Goldmark & Bender in Seattle where he focused on “employment law and tort-based matters” in suits filed by individual plaintiffs or in class actions, according to answers to his Senate Judiciary Questionnaire. Whitehead has also served on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.

Disability groups those who have worked with Whitehead praised his litigation experience, which includes multimillion-dollar class action settlements.

In one such case, Whitehead won a $5 million jury verdict for an employee who was fired after they started using a prosthetic voice box as a result of vocal cord cancer treatment, disability groups said in a letter to the Judiciary Committee. That result was later affirmed by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Christopher M. Sanders, a lawyer and a Whitehead mentor, highlighted his experience as someone who overcame a disability in a letterto the Judiciary Committee.

“It is very important that we have judges who bring these kinds of perspectives to the bench because it can allow those judges to better understand the challenges of the people who come before them,” said Sanders, who is also disabled.

In 1995, the Seattle Times featured then 16-year-old Whitehead in a story about a teen community service project that began, “Remember this name: Jamal Whitehead. He plans to be your president some day.”