On January 11, 2019 the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York granted ECBAWM client Equan Yunus a preliminary injunction removing his unconstitutional designation as a sex offender. Although Mr. Yunus has never committed sexual misconduct, he had been forced to register as a sex offender under New York’s irrational and overbroad offender registration laws. Because of this designation, Mr. Yunus was subject to numerous overbearing parole conditions designed to deter sex offenses that bore no relation to his crime of conviction, including limitations on his ability to access a cell phone or computer and to interact with minor members of his own family.

While the New York Court of Appeals had upheld this law as rational years earlier in another case, the federal court agreed with Mr. Yunus and ECBAWM that this treatment as a sex offender violated his constitutional right to substantive due process. Mr. Yunus’s designation and its accompanying oppressive restrictions must be removed as a result of the Court’s ruling.

ECBAWM Attorneys Andrew G. Celli, Jr. and David Berman represent Mr. Yunus.

“‘There was a lot of shame’: meet the sex offender ‘who is not a sex offender’,”The Guardian
“US Judge Halts Imposition of Registration Requirement on Parolee With No Sex-Offense
Record,” New York Law Journal