The Minnesota Court of Appeals has upheld the convictions of a Lakeville mother who hid her two teenage girls for two years at a horse farm until they were found in November 2015.
But the appeals court also ruled that a Dakota County judge erred when she sentenced Sandra Grazzini-Rucki, 52, to an unusual jail sentence that would see her serving 15 days annually until 2022, to be served on the anniversary that her daughters disappeared.
Grazzini-Rucki asked to serve out a stayed sentence of eight months in prison to get the sentence over with rather than stretch it out over six years, her attorney Stephen Grigsby said at the time. Judge Karen Asphaug refused the request. Both Grazzini-Rucki and the Dakota County attorney's office argued that the judge's sentence was more onerous than a sentence of up to eight months in prison. The appeals court agreed and asked the judge to execute the stayed sentence.
A Dakota County jury found Grazzini-Rucki guilty of several counts of Deprivation of Parental Rights in 2016. Grazzini-Rucki appealed the conviction on numerous grounds, including ineffective counsel, but the Appeals Court rejected each argument.
Brandon Stahl
