Leland Yee

Leland Yin Yee is an American former politician who served as a member of the California State Senate for District 8, which covered parts of San Francisco and the Peninsula.

Prior to becoming state senator, Yee was a California State Assemblyman, Supervisor of San Francisco's Sunset District, and President of the San Francisco School Board.

That same year, Yee passed California Assembly Bills 1792 & 1793, a video game bill that criminalizes sale of video games rated M to children under 18 and require retailers to place M-rated games separate from other games intended for children.

Yee's bills passed in part to mass media concentration on the speculative link between video game violence and real world violence, as well as several support of concerned parent groups.

Notable bills included AB 1969, which increases renewable energy production in the state, AB 2581, which aims to protect student free speech and prohibit school administrators from censoring school newspapers and broadcast journalism, AB 409, which establishes tighter controls and higher health standards for nail salons, and AB 1207, which adds sexual orientation to the list of protections in the Code of Fair Political Practices.

He received his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley and a master's degree at San Francisco State University before earning his PhD in child psychology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 1975.

After obtaining his doctorate, Yee worked as a therapist in the Mental Health Department of San Francisco, the Oakland School District and with Asian American for Community Involvement, a non-profit that serves low-income people.

Yee was elected to the San Francisco Board of Education in 1988 and served two four-year terms on the board including one as board president.

During his tenure, Yee called for audits of all schools in the San Francisco Unified School District and fought to establish performance standards for educators.

In 1992, Yee was arrested for allegedly shoplifting a bottle of tanning oil and gum from the KTA Superstore in Kona's Keauhou Shopping Village.

The case was not prosecuted, as Yee disappeared before he could be prosecuted.

Yee was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1996.

Representing the city's fourth district, Yee was appointed to chair the Finance Committee, where he helped establish the "Rainy Day" budget reserve and introduced General Obligation Bond Accountability Act.

In 1999, Yee was stopped twice by police on suspicion of soliciting prostitutes in San Francisco's Mission District.

He was re-elected to the board in 2000.

In November 2002, Yee was elected to the California State Assembly to represent the 12th district.

In his first year in the Legislature, he was appointed to the Speaker's leadership team as the assistant speaker pro tempore.

In 2004 Yee became the first Asian American to be appointed Speaker pro Tempore, making him the second highest ranking Democrat of the California State Assembly.

In 2004, Yee became the first Asian Pacific American to be appointed speaker pro tempore in the California State Assembly and was elected president of the National Asian Pacific American Caucus of State Legislators.

In his first term in the Legislature, Yee had 15 bills signed into law.

These bills include AB 1371 which strengthens informed consent requirements for mentally handicapped patients that take part in medical research.

Yee had 11 bills chartered into law in 2004.

Noteworthy bills included AB 2412 which allows part-time community college faculty to access unemployment benefits and AB 3042 which enhances sentences for child prostitution.

Yee had 12 bills chartered into law in 2005.

Included in his bill package were AB 800 which ensures a patient's medical records include his/her spoken language, AB 1179 which would have banned the sale of violent video games to children (which was later declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court.), and AJR 14 which states that California officially opposes the weakening of the federal offshore oil drilling moratorium

Following news of the "Hot Coffee mod" in Rockstar North's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Yee claimed that the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) knew about it in advance and criticized them for not rating the game "adults only".

The controversy resulted from the Hot Coffee mod created by personal computer users of the game using hacking tools to create a modification to play a "minigame", or game-within-a-game, which was otherwise inaccessible to players.

In response, Rockstar removed the content used for the modification.

The bill was signed into law on October 7, 2005, and the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) filed a lawsuit 10 days later.

After the bill passed, it was ruled to be unconstitutional by Judge Ronald Whyte.

The adverse ruling required the state to pay $324,840 to the ESA in legal fees.

Yee had 10 bills signed into law in 2006.

(This law was eventually argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010 in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, in which the court struck down the law as unconstitutional.)

Yee was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on March 26, 2014, on charges related to public corruption and gun trafficking—specifically, buying automatic firearms and shoulder-launched missiles from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), an Islamist extremist group located in the southern Philippines and attempting to re-sell those weapons to an undercover FBI agent, as well as accepting a $10,000 bribe from an undercover agent in exchange for placing a call to the California Department of Public Health regarding a contract at the organization.

In response to the gun running and other criminal charges against him, the California State Senate suspended Yee as a Senator on March 28, 2014.

In 2015, Yee pleaded guilty to felony racketeering charges for money laundering, political corruption, arms trafficking, and bribery.

On July 1, 2015, Yee pleaded guilty to a felony racketeering count in relation to money laundering, public corruption and bribery in a joint-prosecution alongside fellow organized crime figures based in San Francisco's Chinatown.

On February 24, 2016, Yee was sentenced to five years in federal prison, and was released on June 26, 2020.

Leland Yee immigrated to San Francisco, California from his birthplace of Taishan, Guangdong, China, when he was three years old and later became a naturalized American citizen.

His father served in the United States Army and the United States Merchant Marine.