Larry Griffin was born on September 23, 1954, in the United States. Before his arrest and trial, little is publicly documented about his personal life, education, or family background. He was known to be a resident of St. Louis, Missouri, where the murder that led to his capital conviction took place.

Griffin’s life prior to the crime appeared to be that of a relatively unknown man to the wider public. He did not have a significant public profile or known criminal record that shaped headlines before the shooting incident in 1980. Most of what is known about Griffin emerged through court proceedings and the later scrutiny of his case following his execution. Throughout the legal process and until the moment of his death, Griffin consistently maintained his innocence, a claim that would later prompt controversy and posthumous investigations into whether justice had been properly served.

On the afternoon of June 26, 1980, 19-year-old Quintin Moss was fatally shot in a drive-by shooting while allegedly dealing drugs on a street corner in St. Louis, Missouri. Larry Griffin was arrested and later charged with Moss’s murder. The key testimony against Griffin at his trial came from Robert Fitzgerald, who placed Griffin at the scene of the shooting. Based on this and other circumstantial evidence, Griffin was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death on October 6, 1981.

Griffin’s appeals were ultimately unsuccessful. Over the next 14 years, various legal efforts to overturn his conviction or secure clemency were denied by state and federal courts. On June 21, 1995, Larry Griffin was executed by lethal injection in Missouri. He went to his death insisting he had not committed the crime.

A decade later, in 2005, Griffin’s case returned to public attention when the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund sponsored a post-execution investigation. The inquiry raised serious doubts about the validity of Griffin’s conviction, particularly concerning the identity of the actual shooter. Among the concerns were the reliability of witness testimony and potential suppression of exculpatory evidence.

As a result of the NAACP's findings, the St. Louis City Circuit Attorney’s Office launched its own independent re-investigation. This official inquiry concluded that "the right person was convicted." The renewed investigation reportedly discovered a new witness whose account corroborated Fitzgerald’s original trial testimony. Despite the controversy, the city’s final position was that Griffin’s conviction had been legally sound.