Parent Testimonials & Reviews

I have been trying to figure out how to write a testimonial for Ron Palmer, and the problem is not finding something good to say. The problem is figuring out how to reduce what he did for me to a few pages.

On April 4, 2018, I was put in jail on civil contempt in Grenada County, Mississippi. I did not walk out until June 14, 2024.

Six years, two months and ten days.

By the time Ron Palmer entered my life, I had been locked up for years. I had lawyers. I had appealed. I had researched. My son, Beau, had already gone to war for me largely by himself. My mother had sent me Ron and Sherry Palmer’s book, Not in the Child’s Best Interest. I had talked to people who said they wanted to help. Most of them eventually disappeared, stopped responding, or reached the point where they had accepted so much of the official narrative surrounding my case that there was little they could do for me anyway.

Beau did not quit.

Then Ron showed up.

That distinction is important. Beau did not join Ron’s fight. Ron joined Beau’s. And once he did, the two of them went to war.

Our first contacts had to be worked around the fact that I was sitting in a jail cell. There were particular times I could use a telephone. Sometimes calls came from a jail payment system. I could get email, but not like a free man sitting at a desk with unlimited access to his files. Ron and Sherry worked around all of it.

There were nights when Ron and I talked while I was locked in my cell about constitutional law, jurisdiction, contempt, habeas corpus, judicial immunity, due process, what had happened in my case and what we could possibly do next. I would research from inside the jail and send him cases, court rules, transcripts, docket entries, Mississippi authorities and whatever else I could get my hands on. Ron would take that material, disappear into it, and come back with something that looked like it had been produced by a litigation team.

This was before artificial intelligence made it possible for ordinary people to generate lengthy legal research in minutes. Ron could sit down and produce forty, fifty, sometimes more pages of dense constitutional argument in what seemed like no time at all.

And he did it over and over again.

The record still exists. There was the Letter of Notice. The Motion for Clarification. Responses when opposing counsel answered. Challenges to jurisdiction. Responses to contempt proceedings. Arguments over my ability to pay. Mississippi Supreme Court work. Federal habeas work. Responses to efforts to stop me from filing. Mandamus. Federal-court strategy. Work involving Beau. Affidavits. Appeals. More motions. More research. More drafts.

At one point my former wife’s attorney responded to what we were filing by asking the court to restrain me from filing anything else. That tells you something.

Ron had not found some procedural trick that caused everybody to suddenly agree with us. What he had done was make ignoring me increasingly difficult. That is Ron Palmer’s style.

He does not merely write a motion and hope somebody reads it. He identifies the premise, follows it through the law, anticipates the answer, and then attacks the answer. By the time he is finished, everybody receiving the document understands that somebody has started keeping score.

I have joked that if you give Ron Palmer five thousand dollars, by the time he uses it up, your judge is damn well going to know who you are. I mean that.

You are not going to spend the next year wondering whether somebody remembered your case while hearings get postponed and papers sit untouched. Ron works. He researches. He writes. He calls. He follows up. He wants to know what happened. And when something comes back against you, his reaction is generally not, “Well, that’s unfortunate.” His reaction is: What did they say? Send it to me. Then he goes back to work.

I paid Ron what I could. A close friend of mine helped pay him as well. At the time I had recently sold a gravel operation and had already spent or lost a substantial amount of money fighting my case and pursuing appeals. Eventually Ron knew perfectly well that the money was gone. He also knew I was still sitting in jail.

He stayed.

That may be the most important sentence in this entire testimonial. Ron stayed.

There came a point where our relationship was not accurately described by an invoice. I have emails in which Sherry made clear that I was not obligated to pay and that Ron was continuing to work on my case anyway. And he did. Nobody could possibly look at the volume of work Ron Palmer produced in my case and honestly say that man was counting hours against whatever money I had paid him.

The money had ceased to explain the work. Commitment explained it.

He believed something was wrong. He believed there was a constitutional problem worth fighting over. And once he decided that, he became extraordinarily difficult to run off.

There is another part of this story that matters deeply to me. Ron did not just deal with me. He dealt with my son. Beau was young when this began. While his father was confined, Beau had to grow up in the middle of a fight he did not create. He was trying to get his father home while adults with far more power than he had controlled the institutions around us. Ron talked to him. Worked with him. Explained things to him. Helped him formulate arguments. Helped him file things. And eventually Beau was not standing outside that system alone anymore. I will never forget that.

By 2024, the pressure was coming from multiple directions. State court. Federal court. Habeas. Mandamus. Beau’s efforts. Constitutional arguments. Challenges to what had been done and to what was still being done.

On June 14, 2024, I went to court. That morning I emailed Ron and Sherry from jail: I’m about to be released.

I was returned to the jail while the paperwork was prepared, and for several hours I still did not know whether it was actually going to happen. That evening it did. After 2,263 days, I walked out.

I am careful about claiming that any single motion, person or legal theory “caused” my release. Six years of litigation does not reduce honestly to something that simple. But I know what happened before Ron Palmer got involved, and I know what happened after.

Before Ron, the system had grown comfortable with me being there. After Ron, comfortable was no longer an option. He and Beau kept coming from different directions. If one avenue closed, another opened. If somebody made an argument, Ron studied the argument. If somebody issued an order, we studied the order. If someone claimed there was no remedy, Ron started looking for the remedy. Three days after I finally walked out of that jail, Ron was already talking about the next filing.

That is Ron Palmer.

I am not writing this because Ron is perfect. Ron and I can argue. I question things. He questions things. We have disagreed plenty of times. That is another reason I trust him. He never needed me to worship him. He needed me to think. He wanted me to read the cases. He wanted me to understand what we were filing. He wanted me to challenge something I did not understand. He expected me to do my part. And he did his.

If you are looking for somebody who will politely collect your money, send a few letters and then explain why nothing can be done, Ron Palmer is probably not the person you are looking for.

If you want somebody who is going to study the battlefield, load the cannons and make the other side realize somebody has arrived, then I know that man. His name is Ronald Palmer.

I know because when almost everybody else was gone, Ron was still there. And when the jail door finally opened, he was still there too.

— Justin McPhail