The recent arrest of Windsor County Sheriff Ryan Palmer on charges of sexual misconduct has led lawmakers to once again confront questions about oversight of Vermont’s 14 elected sheriffs.
Prosecutors say Palmer paid women to watch him masturbate — and, in one case, have sex with him — then threatened them and encouraged them to lie to state police investigators.
He pleaded not guilty last month to a slate of crimes that carry a potential punishment of up to 27 years in prison. A judge released him on conditions that he turn over his guns and avoid contacting the accusers in his case.
The allegations led state regulators last week to take the rare step of summarily suspending Palmer’s law enforcement certification while his criminal case plays out. The move effectively confines the sheriff to administrative duties and prevents him from acting as a law enforcement official.
But neither that nor finger-wagging from fellow elected officials — including Gov. Phil Scott, who has called on Palmer to resign — will be enough to compel the sheriff to give up power entirely. That’s because sheriffs are largely walled off from external oversight, allowing them to maintain their own little fiefdoms.
Sheriffs are not required to be certified law enforcement officers, which prevents regulators from forcing them off the job in the same way they could a beat cop accused of serious crimes. And unlike police chiefs, who report to mayors, town managers or local governing boards, sheriffs are elected by the voters in their county. They can be removed only through impeachment proceedings in the Vermont legislature, a time-consuming process that legislative leaders are reluctant to pursue.
A constitutional amendment debated during the 2023-24 legislative biennium would have given lawmakers more authority over sheriffs and other county-elected officials. But opposition from sheriffs scuttled the proposal. Because amendments can only be proposed every four years, the matter can’t be raised again until 2027.
Lawmakers say they will dust off the proposal next session in light of Palmer’s case.
“It just feels like this really horrible déjà vu, where we again have an elected law enforcement officer using his position of power to intimidate and harass and abuse women who are his constituents and the people he’s supposed to protect,” Sen. Ruth Hardy (D-Addison), a cosponsor of the 2023 proposal, said.
Palmer did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
A state police investigation that began as a probe into potential financial mismanagement at the Windsor County Sheriff’s Department led detectives to three women who accused the sheriff of repeatedly targeting them with sexual advances. One described how Palmer began stalking her after she broke off contact, driving by her rural home and showing up outside her workplace.
Palmer told reporters after his arraignment on January 28 that he has delegated daily oversight of his department to a subordinate but would remain sheriff while he fights the charges.
“There’s a lot more to this story,” he said.
Claude Weyant, the captain whom Palmer has left in charge in his absence, told Seven Days last week that the sheriff has checked in with him several times since his arrest. Palmer recently visited the office to address his staff.
“He just encouraged us to move forward,” Weyant said.
Palmer is only the latest sheriff in Vermont to refuse to step down in the face of criminal charges.
In April 2022, news broke that Vermont State Police were investigating a disturbance at the home of then-Addison County sheriff Peter Newton. A few days later, Newton posted a video to YouTube in which he described struggles with anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. He revealed that he had made a plan to kill himself during his first year in office.
One of Newton’s deputies subsequently wrote to state officials that there could be “dire and tragic consequences for the community” if the sheriff wasn’t immediately removed from office, Vermont Public reported at the time. But state officials determined that there was nothing they could do.
Newton was arrested two months later and charged with physically and sexually abusing a woman. He stepped away from some of his duties but refused to resign. He remained in office until his term expired in January 2023. Last year, he was sentenced to two years of probation after pleading guilty to lewd and lascivious conduct and simple assault.
The same month Newton left office, Franklin County swore in its newest sheriff: the embattled John Grismore, who won election despite being caught on video twice kicking a detained man.
Prosecutors charged Grismore with simple assault a few weeks before the November 2022 election, and Vermont lawmakers briefly considered impeaching him. But the sheriff was defiant, refusing to step down despite a chorus of calls for his resignation, including from the Vermont Sheriffs’ Association.
His resistance paid off: The criminal charge was dropped after two mistrials. The impeachment inquiry was scrapped, and he remains in office.
Other sheriffs have been accused of inadequately serving their constituents. In response to inquiries from VTDigger in 2022, Chad Schmidt acknowledged that he had been living in Tennessee for a third of the previous two years while still serving as Bennington County’s sheriff. And shortly before stepping down in 2023, Caledonia County sheriff Dean Shatney doled out $400,000 worth of bonuses to himself and his staff.
The scandals were fresh on lawmakers’ minds when they entered the 2024 legislative session vowing to make sheriffs more accountable.
Proposal 1 would have tweaked the Vermont Constitution so that the legislature could set qualifications for elected county officials. The bill did not specify exactly what the qualifications would be, but lawmakers who worked on the proposal said one easy fix would be to require sheriffs to hold an active law enforcement certification.
That would have effectively given the Vermont Criminal Justice Council, which oversees the certification process, the ability to quickly expel a bad-acting sheriff.
But the Vermont Sheriffs’ Association staunchly opposed the proposal, arguing that there was no way to know what qualifications a future legislature might impose, which could leave the door open for a sheriff to be removed from office for political reasons, without due process. And Democratic leaders in the Senate scrapped the idea after determining that they didn’t have 20 votes to pass the proposal, despite holding a supermajority.
Reflecting on the outcome this week, Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth (D/P-Chittenden-Central) said he tried his “level human best” to drum up support for the measure. “What prevented it was a relatively small group of Democrats who were very influenced by their local sheriffs to vote against it,” he said.
Baruth said he believes the Senate Government Operations Committee should take up the proposal first thing next year.
“There are fine upstanding sheriffs in our state, and they do yeoman’s work,” he said. “But there are just too many of them that are completely disregarding not only the law but just general morality.”
Any reasonable person would say we need some ability to rein in rogue sheriffs, and we don’t.
Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth
“Any reasonable person would say we need some ability to rein in rogue sheriffs, and we don’t,” he added.
The proposal would likely need support from Republicans, who currently hold 13 of the 30 Senate seats.
Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck (R-Caledonia) told Seven Days that the party’s support of any sheriff oversight bills would ultimately depend on the specific proposal. But he agreed that the topic should be a priority next session.
“Obviously there’s something systematically wrong, and we need to take a close look at it,” he said.
The sheriffs’ association, which has come under new leadership since 2024, would not say whether it will support Proposal 1 now that yet another one of its members has been arrested. Orleans County Sheriff Jennifer Harlow, the association’s president, said the power to impeach already gives lawmakers some oversight of sheriffs.
“We look forward to having fruitful discussions with lawmakers,” Harlow said.
Even if lawmakers had managed to previously pass Proposal 1, it wouldn’t have been in place in time to address Palmer’s situation. Constitutional amendments must be approved by lawmakers in two successive bienniums before heading to voters.
“Still, the fact that it didn’t move a couple of years ago just means that it’s further delayed,” said Hardy, the Addison senator. Now, the earliest that Vermont could pass an amendment is 2030.
Palmer’s criminal case will almost certainly be resolved before then. He’s also up for reelection this November. Should he run again, he could lose his job the old-fashioned way: at the ballot box. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Badge of Dishonor | The arrest of yet another Vermont sheriff — and his decision to stay on the job — is prompting lawmakers to consider greater oversight”
This article appears in February 11 • 2026.
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