Jami Floyd, ABC News Correspondent
— -- Since joining ABC News, Floyd has contributed to breaking news reports, as well as long-form coverage for newsmagazines and Nightline.
As a day-of-air reporter, Floyd has covered the 1998 Capitol Hill shooting, the Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo cases in New York and several landmark cases before the United States Supreme Court. She was also part of the news team dispatched to Tallahassee, Florida to cover the disputed 2000 presidential election. More recently, Floyd reported from Ground Zero in the days and weeks after the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.
From 1999 to 2001, Floyd served in the ABC News Law & Justice Unit. As the news division's legal correspondent, she contributed to all ABC News broadcasts, including World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, Good Morning America and Nightline.
Floyd has interviewed newsmakers in every field, including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, international businessman Donald Trump, renowned forensic scientist Henry Lee, the actor Danny Glover, director Rob Reiner and Myrlie Evers-Williams, wife of the slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
Floyd has twice been awarded the CINE Golden Eagle Award and twice the the U.S. International Film & Video Festival Gold Camera Award. Her other awards include the PPFA Maggie Award, and the NABJ Salute to Excellence. In 1999, she was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy for her Outstanding Coverage of a Breaking News Story after she reported on the fatal plane crash of John Kennedy's airplane.
In her work for the ABC newsmagazines, Floyd has continued her coverage of emerging social and political issues. In that context, she has covered linguistic profiling, the Rampart police corruption scandal in Los Angeles, and several cases in which DNA has proved convicted felons innocent.
Floyd joined ABC News from Court TV, where she served as an anchor and correspondent from 1996-1998. While at Court TV, she covered the O.J. Simpson trial, the Oklahoma City bombing trials, and several landmark cases involving the tobacco industry, including the $206 billion tobacco settlement.
Her first television broadcasting job was as a legal analyst at KPIX-TV in San Francisco. In 1995, she joined the CBS newsmagazine, Day & Date, also as a legal analyst.
An honors graduate of the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, Floyd began her career at the California Supreme Court as a law clerk to the late Hon. Allen E. Broussard. She then joined the California law firm of Morrison & Foerster and began a civil and criminal law practice. In 1993, she joined the Office of the San Francisco Public Defender, where she continued her work as a trial attorney. In late 1993, she moved to Washington, D.C., to serve as a White House fellow, assigned first to the office of First Lady Hillary Clinton, and later to the office of Vice President Al Gore.
Floyd holds a B.A. in political science from Binghamton University. In addition to her JD, she holds a Master of Laws degree from the Stanford Law School, where she also taught.