When attorney Ed Garland joined his father Reuben Garland’s law practice in 1964, he became the sixth generation to earn a living as a lawyer. After a 52-year career that shows no signs of abating, Garland still recalls the first murder trial his father assigned to him, when it was just two weeks away. The client had “juked” her husband with a paring knife and “cut out the bottom of his heart,” he said. The morning of the trial, Garland said his father called before dawn to ask him if he had been to the crime scene. When the younger Garland said no, his father met him there. When Ed Garland told his father he planned to argue that the dead man previously had abused his wife and had threatened her with a rock, Reuben asked his son, “Do you see a rock?” Ed Garland picked one up.
That sizable rock became Exhibit No. 1, Garland said. When Garland’s client testified that it looked like and surely could have been the rock in question, Garland placed it on the edge of the jury box. It “fell right in,” he recalled. The jurors who scrambled to recover it later voted to acquit. “I think it was luck,” Garland said of the rock’s plunge into the jury box. “But it might have been luck that was helped.”
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