Equan Yunus was labeled a sex offender under a New York law for kidnapping a 14-year-old boy, even though no sex crime was committed – and now his case may go to the supreme court

It’s not the most conventional opening question, but the man I’ve come to talk to, Equan Yunus, is in a pretty unusual predicament. So I ask it anyway.

“Are we about to get arrested?”

Yunus fidgets a little in his chair. As do his two attorneys sitting beside him, Andrew Celli and David Berman. We’re gathered in their law offices in the bustling heart of Manhattan, and after a pause they admit that they have not the faintest clue as to whether or not we are in breach of New York statute.

Yunus is forbidden under pain of arrest and incarceration from ever coming within 1,000 feet of any school grounds. He is also prohibited from entering within 300 yards of places where children congregate, such as toy stores, parks, pet shops, playgrounds, skating rinks and bowling alleys.

Yunus could be standing on one side of a Manhattan block and on the other side of the building, totally unbeknownst to him, there could be a playground or skating rink that would send him to prison. So are we breaking the law just by sitting in this office?

“It’s impossible to know,” Yunus says, looking distressed. “I do my best to check. I try really hard to be conscious when I’m walking in areas with schools or parks and avoid them. But you try – it’s just impossible.”

Yunus is a sex offender. Or at least, he is a sex offender in the eyes of New York. For the past two years he has lived in the city under some of the most arduous restrictions imposed by any state in America on an individual not behind bars.

The regulations control virtually everything he does, from where he resides, to his job, when he goes to sleep, when he wakes up, where he travels, how and with whom he communicates, what media he consumes. They even govern the intimate conversations he has with his girlfriend.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Equan Yunus at his lawyers’ office. Photograph: Max Burkhalter/Max Burkhalter for Guardian US

The rules are designed for a very good reason – to protect children from adults convicted of sex-related offences. But in Yunus’s case, there’s a twist: he has never – not now, not ever in his past – committed, or even attempted, a sex crime.

“This is the story about a sex offender who is not a sex offender,” Celli says.

Let’s state it clearly though: Yunus, 43, is no angel. He has a serious criminal record, for which he has paid a similarly heavy price.

From the age of 15, like many African American male teenagers living in the outer boroughs of New York in the early 1990s, he fell into the drug trade. Though he didn’t use himself, for several years he sold crack cocaine on the streets of Harlem and Washington Heights in Manhattan, as well as parts of New Jersey and Philadelphia.

The more he dealt, the more grandiose his conduct became. “A lot of my friends were some of the biggest drug dealers in New York,” he says. “I developed some of their lifestyle. By the time I was in my 20s I was probably making $10,000 a day.”

Then, sometime in 2001, he overreached himself. The huge sums he was pulling in made him want even more. He devised ever more risky ways of making cash. That year he carried out two kidnappings, grabbing drug distributors or their family members off the streets, then releasing them for drug money ransom.

The first he nabbed was a 27-year-old for whom he received $60,000. Then he made his big mistake: he kidnapped another male drug dealer, the son of a major cocaine distributor on the west side of Harlem.

Yunus thought his victim was in his early 20s, but he was in fact 14. The boy was let go after a day. The drug-dealing father contacted the police, and Yunus was arrested. He pleaded guilty and served 15 years in New York state’s maximum security prisons.

That’s a pretty heavy rap sheet, I say. So why should we care? Why should anybody have empathy for someone who kidnapped a 14-year-old boy?

Yunus and his lawyers stress that in prison he cleaned up his life, weaning himself from the criminal life, taking a degree through outreach from Bard college and studying the law. “If you made a mistake in your life, you did something wrong, we live in a country where sometimes you get a second chance,” he says. I should be allowed to rehabilitate myself in society.”

But there’s another reason for caring about his story that actually has very little to do with him. It’s that Yunus’s treatment in the hands of the authorities since his release in July 2016 makes no sense, and nonsensical laws tend to be bad laws.

The case has the potential to go all the way to the US supreme court for a final ruling on whether the statute – and similar laws in other states such as Illinois and Wisconsin – are in tune with the US constitution. The question is especially pertinent for New York, a place which prides itself on its forward thinking, because it places it firmly in the realm of the overbearing, irrational uber-state so powerfully imagined by Franz Kafka.

A month before he was let out of prison on parole, Yunus was sent a letter. He was instructed that he had to attend a hearing to assess his risk level as a sex offender.

Sex offender? What?

He was told that New York’s legal definition of a sex offender included any adult who kidnapped someone under the age of 17 who was not their own child. In other words, if you kidnap a minor, you are automatically deemed a sex offender, even if there is nothing sexual about it.

Andrew Celli, a partner at the New York law firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady who is representing Yunus in a lawsuit challenging his status, says: “Equan is a round peg squashed into a square hole, in the context of a panic about sex crimes in this country. These crimes are scary and horrible. People who commit real sex crimes should be punished and treated, both. But Equan is not one of those people.”

At the ensuing hearing, Michael Obus of the New York state supreme court expressed incredulity. The judge noted that Yunus had no history of sexual misconduct and there was no indication that he had a propensity for it. He said that he was “satisfied there is virtually no likelihood that [Yunus] will commit a sex crime ever”.

But Obus’s hands were tied – under state law he had no choice but to label Yunus a sex offender and put him on the sex offenders’ registry for the next 20 years.

“That gave me a lot of bad feelings,” Yunus says. “I was really disturbed. There was a lot of embarrassment and shame. Even today I feel that burden. People give me looks – ‘You’re a sex offender, you must have done something’.”

As soon as Yunus was released, he was presented with a list of sex offender restrictions.

There are 48 listed restrictions, and they circumscribe his every move. As he read down the list he felt a chill pass through him: how could he possibly abide by all these edicts and not get sent back to prison? “It covers every tiny detail of your life. They want to know when you took your last breath.” When he expressed his alarm to a parole officer, he was told to “man up” and deal with it.

In addition to the 1,000ft and 300 yards rules, here is a selection of the fruitier conditions, all of which he is required to follow:

19. I will not have animals (puppies, kittens etc) in my possession.

21. I will not hitchhike, or pick up hitchhikers.

23. I will not cross dress or participate in any sexual fetishes.

24. I will notify my parole officer when I establish a relationship with a consenting adult and then shall inform the party of my prior criminal history concerning sexual abuse.

30. I shall be in my approved residence between the hours of 8pm and 8am.

39. I will not use, possess, have control of any computer.

46. I will not submit to any medical procedures meant to enhance my sexual functioning such as penile implants.

Some of the entries are almost amusing, given his status as a non-sex offender sex offender. He is not a cross-dresser, and has no desire for penis enlargement, so those commands didn’t bother him.

But other restrictions deeply affect his daily life. Since leaving prison, he has been obliged to reside in a shelter for sex offenders in the Bronx.

He asked to move to a rental apartment of his own that he carefully checked was beyond 1,000ft of any school, but was turned down. He found that denial made little sense, given that right over the road from his residence is a shelter for homeless families in which scores of children are living.

Other items impinged too. Number 30, his curfew, makes it difficult for him to attend evening classes or to take jobs with irregular hours; 39 prohibits him from computer use (he is also deprived of a cellphone) which makes studying impossible.

Family ties are harmed too. Last year he had to cancel attending Thanksgiving dinner with his uncle, because his under-17 cousins would be present. When he requested special dispensation from a parole officer, he was told that he could go, but if any kids were present he would be instantly sent back to prison. He didn’t go.

Item 24 posed another hurdle when he established a relationship with his now fiancee Laetitia. Under the rules, the couple was obliged to attend a meeting with a parole officer so that Yunus could tell Laetitia in front of the official that he was a sex offender. “She couldn’t understand initially,” Yunus says. “It was a lot to explain. It put a lot of strain on both of us.”

Other men in the sex offenders’ shelter in the Bronx who, like him, are also not sex offenders, have decided to accept their lot and lump it. That’s not Equan Yunus’s way.

“I can’t just sit there and keep taking it. I have to channel this hardship through the courts.”

While he was in prison he taught himself law, with the help of his mentor, Derrick Hamilton, a legendary jailhouse lawyer. Hamilton was convicted of murder on the back of corrupt New York police department detective Louis Scarcella, but won his own freedom after 21 years in prison by learning the law and proving his own innocence.

Yunus has applied a similar determination to his own attempt to rid himself of the sex offender status. He wrote the initial complaint in August 2017 in a handwritten filing in which he argued his treatment was a violation of the US constitution under the “due process” clause of the 14th amendment.

Now, with Celli and Berman’s backing, he has won the support of a federal magistrate who has recommended that Yunus should be taken off the registry and freed from all the main restrictions. The next step for Yunus will be a hearing on 3 October in front of a federal district judge. New York state is doggedly fighting the case.

The state set out its objections to Yunus coming off the registry in a 34-page document in which it argued that it is entirely logical to label a non-sex offender as a sex offender where kidnapping of a child is involved. “Such a provision is rationally related to the state’s interest in protecting minors,” it said.

Yunus and his lawyers are determined to counter such thinking with their own logic. As Celli puts it: “Sex offender is one of the greatest stigmas in society today. It’s the absolute scarlet letter. In Equan’s case he just doesn’t deserve it – he didn’t commit the crime.”