Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) patients typically become blind after a period of years in which their eye sight slowly deteriorates due to photoreceptor degeneration. Generally RP patients develop night-blindness first, then tunnel vision, after which finally the central eye sight diminishes leaving them with basically no eye sight, barred some crude residual light perception. The wiki page on RP has more information when needed. Typically, the process from diagnosis of RP to (near) complete loss of eye sight takes years to decades.

However, Chebat et al. (2007) make mention that their study group, consisting of congenitally blind subjects, includes one person with RP (see table 1 in the linked article). Hence, this implicates that this particular subject was blind from birth due to effects of RP.

Is anyone familiar with newborns blinded by the effects of RP?

Reference
Chebat et al. Neuroreport 2007;18:1901-4