Andy Thibault, who has worked with The Register Citizen, Middletown Press and New Haven Register over the past two years as a columnist and contributing editor, was honored Wednesday with the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information‘s Stephen A. Collins Award.
According to CCFOI President Jim Smith, Thibault was instrumental in ensuring that the clemency hearing of convicted murderer Bonnie Foreshaw proceeded in public. He unearthed a 25 year-old letter from a public defender stating that Foreshaw had not received a fair trial. When she was released last November, one of her first questions was, “Where’s Andy?”
Andy Thibault accepts the 2014 Stephen A. Collins Award from the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information.
Thibault has hammered away on Freedom of Information Act and open government issues over the course of his career as a reporter, editor, teacher and activist. He is a former member of the state’s Freedom of Information Commission and the Litchfield Board of Education. A former editor of The Register Citizen who has also worked at the Hartford Courant and several other Connecticut newspapers, Thibault is a licensed professional boxing judge, a moving force behind the Connecticut Young Writers Project and a private investigator.
Thibault’s reporting tackled police brutality in Hartford in the early 1990s, the Young & Rubicam “Come Back to Jamaica” kickback scandal, the financial irregularities of the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, the cover-up of a hit-and-run death in New London and the 1996 bombing at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. He is the author of several books, including, “History of the Connecticut State Police” in 2003 and “Law & Justice in Everyday Life” in 2002.
Others honored by CCFOI as champions of open government Wednesday were South Windsor Police Chief Matt Read, CTNewsJunkie.com reporter Hugh McQuaid and state Sen. Ed Meyer.
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Congratulations, Andy! Great journalist and person. I have known him since high school. Patty Shaughnessy