Anatomy of a wrongful conviction: How Minnesota convicted Sandra Grazzini-Rucki

The sham trial in 2016 featured jury misconduct, judicial misconduct, media misconduct, and prosecutorial misconduct.

Sandra Grazzini-Rucki

It was the early morning hours on October 18, 2015.

Four members of the equivalent of the SWAT team, Special Weapons and Tactics, from the US Marshals broke down the door of a time share in Florida.

They entered the bedroom door and put four rifles to the head of the person sleeping: Sandra “Sam” Grazzini-Rucki.

She was ripped out of bed, she remembers, thrown to the floor, and one of the US Marshals threw her clothes at her.

She was handcuffed and taken to the living room, where her colleague, Jack, a flight attendant with her at Delta, was also handcuffed.

“Where are the guns: where are the girls?” The Marshals kept screaming, she remembers.

Only there were no guns or girls: only two flight bags.

The Marshals claimed Grazzini-Rucki was a federal fugitive, wanted for child trafficking, gun running, and kidnapping.

Only as the night unfolded, there was a problem.

The warrant originated in Minnesota.

Grazzini-Rucki remembers one of the Marshals making several calls and not getting any answers.

This purported warrant- the one for gunrunning, child trafficking, and kidnapping- didn’t exist.

There was another warrant: a state warrant for parental deprivation for Sandra Grazzini-Rucki.

Parental deprivation is a unique charge from Minnesota with a maximum sentence of a year and presumed probation.

It was hardly the charge a state would ask the US Marshals for help.

The Marshals had been used, but they didn’t care.

Rather than taking Grazzini-Rucki to a federal prison, they took her to a state prison in Osceola County, Florida.

There, she told me, she was told that she was listed as an “assaultive felon”, and, as such, she was housed in the maximum-security unit.

None of it was true. Before this arrest, Grazzini-Rucki didn’t even have a parking ticket.