Tresa Baldas

Detroit Free Press

Curled up on a bunk in his broken-down truck, waiting three hours for help in sub-zero temperatures, Detroiter Alphonse Maddin feared death was near.

He had zero feeling in his feet. His torso was going numb. And a burning feeling took over as he started to fade in the 14-below meat truck.

Maddin said he could have died that night but one man didn’t care: U.S. Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, a federal judge who ruled against Maddin in a legal case that has landed the Detroit man at the vortex of a debate about whether Gorsuch is a man of the people or big business as he is poised to be appointed to the nation's highest court.

In an interview with the Free Press, Maddin, an avid trumpet player and skilled artist who grew up on the city's west side and once designed products for the Detroit Three automakers, said Gorsuch is out of touch with working-class people and shouldn't sit on the high court after ruling against him last year. Gorsuch sided with the employer who fired Maddin for abandoning his trailer so that he could get to safety.

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The trucking company has long argued that it did nothing wrong, disputing claims that the truck's heater didn’t work and noting that Maddin filed an initial complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but that the agency ruled against him.

Yet out of seven judges who had heard the case over the years, Gorsuch was the only judge to rule in favor of the trucking company.

And how he did it was numbing, said Maddin.

“He referred to me simply as a trucker,” Maddin said. “I’m a human being who has a name … but he followed the company’s argument to get the world to ignore the magnitude of the circumstances, to forget that a man was about to freeze to death.”

And that man, he stressed, is a lot more than a trucker. Maddin, 48, is a proud Detroiter who overcame the hurdle of growing up without a father, who was shot to death when Maddin was 5. Maddin's refuge became music, art and drawing. He took up the trumpet in third grade and earned a scholarship to study jazz at Langston University in Oklahoma. He would go on to earn two college degrees and make a living designing products for the automotive industry until the 2008 recession hit, landing him in the truck driving business.

But Gorsuch couldn't identify with a man like him, Maddin said. To the judge, he said, he was only a trucker.

“The general sentiment that’s out there right now … that he has a propensity to favor the corporate world versus the people – I think it’s valid,” Maddin said.

A look at the case

It has been eight years since Maddin was fired from his truck driving job, though he didn't get closure until last year.

After years of administrative hearings and legal feuding, the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals last year ruled 2-1 in his favor and ordered the trucking company to rehire Maddin, who instead took back pay.

The judge who ruled against him was Gorsuch, though Maddin wouldn't read his dissent until months later, when President Donald Trump announced his nominee to the Supreme Court, and before long, the case about the Michigan truck driver who almost froze to death made national news.

Maddin discovered all the buzz while Googling his name. He was applying for a job one day and decided to search his name on the Internet. Articles popped up linking his name to Trump, Gorsuch and the U.S. Supreme Court. He opened up the stories and discovered all the controversy: Gorsuch was getting drilled for ruling against him.

So he decided to read the full dissent for himself.

"I was like, '"Whoa! ... Wait a minute, he said all this stuff?" recalled Maddin.

In writing his opinion, Gorsuch stressed that he had to determine whether the employer's decision to fire Maddin was legal, not "wise or kind."

Maddin had sued under a law known as the Surface Transportation Assistance Act, which prohibits companies from firing a driver who "refuses to operate" an unsafe truck.

Gorsuch concluded that the law didn't apply to Maddin because — he reasoned — he didn't refuse to operate the truck, but rather drove off in it.

"A trucker was stranded on the side of the road, late at night, in cold weather, and his trailer brakes were stuck," Gorsuch wrote in his dissent. "He called his company for help and someone there gave him two options. He could drag the trailer carrying the company's goods to its destination (an illegal and maybe sarcastically offered option). Or he could sit and wait for help to arrive (a legal if unpleasant option). The trucker chose None of the Above, deciding instead to unhook the trailer and drive his truck to a gas station. In response, his employer, TransAm, fired him for disobeying orders and abandoning its trailer and goods."

The dissent has since dogged Gorsuch, who has maintained that he followed the law.

"My job is to apply the law as written," Gorsuch said during Senate confirmation hearings, while being grilled by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. "The law said he would be protected if he refused to operate. By any plain understanding, he operated the vehicle. And if Congress wishes to revise the law — I wrote this: I said it was an unkind decision, it might have been a wrong decision, a bad decision, but my job isn't to write the law ... it's to apply the law."

In a March 22 editorial, the Chicago Tribune supported Gorsuch.

"Some of Gorsuch's critics think judges should be creative and expansive depending on the political climate — to treat laws differently on a cold night than a warm one. Those critics suggest that they fear Gorsuch won't follow the law, but the opposite is more true: They fear he will. Gorsuch should be confirmed."

He's not 'folksy'

Attorney Robert Fetter, who represented Maddin in his lawsuit, said Gorsuch's "folksy" and "pleasant" demeanor in the confirmation hearings contrast sharply to the judge he saw on the bench.

"I did not detect any of this pleasant disposition or folksiness. He was hostile. As a matter of fact, he was quite hostile," said Fetter, claiming Gorsuch went out of his way to "cherry-pick" the law to uphold firing Maddin.

"He went quite a length, in my opinion, to find a way to rule against him," Fetter said. "It shows something about his judicial philosophy or perhaps his bias being pro business or pro corporation. It's just bias."

Maddin agrees, though he still can't fathom why or how a judge could rule against him given what he went through. Here, according to his account, is what happened:

Maddin was hauling a truck of meat across the country when he noticed he was running low on fuel, so he pulled over on a toll road in Illinois to call his company and ask what station he should fill up at, as was protocol. When he pulled over, his brakes froze up, so he called roadside service for help. While stranded, he decided to lay down in a bunk and wait. He presumed help would arrive within an hour.

Three hours later, his cell phone rang and woke him up. It was a relative checking on him.

Maddin could barely talk. His feet and torso were numb. He struggled to breathe. The temperature gauge read minus 14.

"I felt myself fading, and at a rapid pace.That's when I realized I could possibly die," Maddin said. "I thought about me arriving back home in a casket, and I was thinking, 'that's not going to happen without me fighting for my life.' "

Maddin called the company's roadside service again. They told him to wait, 'just try to hang in there,' " he recalled.

Instead, Maddin put on his boots and climbed out of the truck to unhitch the trailer. It was the only thing keeping him from getting to safety.

"I remember thinking that if I fell, that would probably be it. I wouldn't have the strength to stand back up," he recalled.

But he managed. He unhitched the 50-foot-long trailer, drove to a station and warmed up and fueled up. Eventually, he drove back to the trailer, which got repaired, hooked it back up and made his meat deliveries, as required.

When he returned to the company's headquarters in Kansas, three people were sitting in a room waiting for him.

"They fired me," he recalled.

And then they blackballed him, he said, claiming his employer notified the trucking industry through a reporting system that Maddin had broken a cardinal sin: he abandoned a truck on the side of the road,even though staying meant he could die. He would later discover that the truck was not rated to produce heat in the frigid temps that he was in.

Today, Maddin is unemployed, living with family and friends until he can land on his feet. He's somewhat optimistic. While his case played out in the courts, he took the initiative to go back to school, earning a bachelor's of applied science from the University of Michigan in Dearborn and then a master's degree in 2016. He walked across the stage in April.

Four months later came the favorable court ruling. He had finally won his case with the trucking company.

It was an emotional win for Maddin, especially because of where he came from. When he first went to trucking school, he said, he felt stigmatized because he was from Detroit, noting he heard snide remarks about Detroiters during training. That weighed heavily on his mind, he said, especially when he got fired.

"I felt like I wasn't only standing up for myself, but I felt like I was standing up for my city," Maddin said. "I was hell-bent on winning."

Contact Tresa Baldas: tbaldas@freepress.com