Nia Gill - Biography

Biography

New Jersey Gov.-elect Jon Corzine said on November 11, 2005, that he would consider appointing Gill to fill his vacant seat in the United States Senate following his resignation to become Governor of New Jersey. He later chose Bob Menendez to fill the seat.

Before her service as State Senator, Gill served in the lower house of the New Jersey Legislature, the General Assembly, from 1994 to 2001, where she was Minority Whip from 1996 to 2001. She also served in the Assembly on the Speaker's Education Funding Task Force and on several committees including, the Assembly Democratic Senior Citizen Task Force (as Co-chair) and the Assembly Advisory Committee on the Arts, History and Humanities.

Gill became a candidate for State Senate in District 34 after some of the municipalities she had represented in the Assembly were shifted into the district. Most of the communities added to District 34, which at the time was a Republican stronghold and had been for nearly two decades prior, were heavily Democratic and contributed to Gill's landslide victory over first-time incumbent Norman M. Robertson. In the 2003 primaries, LeRoy J. Jones, Jr. was given the party line opposing Gill. Despite being outspent by Jones in the heavily Democratic district, Gill won with 55% of the vote. addSenator Gill has been re-elected twice, winning elections in 2003 and 2007. (Gill, along with the other 39 state senators, was required to run for her seat after two years due to a New Jersey law taking into effect census changes to districts.)

Gill is a sponsor of the measure recently signed into law to criminalize the deprivation of civil rights by public officials, making racial profiling a state crime. She has also sponsored the New Jersey Civil Rights Act, which would give individuals a remedy whenever one person deprives another person of any rights, privileges or immunities or interferes with another's civil rights. Additionally, she sponsored a resolution to formally rescind an 1868 effort by the New Jersey Legislature to withdraw New Jersey's support for the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and its due process and equal protection provisions.

Gill sponsored legislation that provides a $3,000 income tax deduction for certain families providing home care for an elderly relative, legislation that abolishes the death penalty in New Jersey, and has also sponsored legislation allowing PAAD recipients freedom of choice in selecting a pharmacy and prohibits the imposition of a mail order system. The Senator also sponsored legislation that establishes a central registry of domestic violence orders for use in evaluating firearm permit applications, sponsored legislation to upgrade crimes of the third degree. In addition, Senator Gill is the first African American and the first woman in the history of New Jersey named to serve on the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee.

Gill is generally recognized as being one of the leading abortion rights advocates in New Jersey politics. One significant example is her opposition to the override of then-Governor Christie Whitman's veto of the New Jersey Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 1997 in the New Jersey Assembly.

Gill received a B.A. in History/Political History from Upsala College and was awarded a J.D. from the Rutgers University School of Law. She is an attorney with the firm of Gill & Cohen, P.C. together with former Assembly member Neil M. Cohen of the 20th Legislative District.