Larry Ruffin was wrongfully convicted in Forrest County, Mississippi in 1980 of rape and murder along with two co-defendants, Phillip Bivens and Bobby Ray Dixon. Ruffin died in Parchman Penitentiary 23 years after he was arrested, in 2002.

With the consent of the Forrest County district attorney, IPNO and volunteer co-counsel, Rob McDuff, obtained DNA testing in 2010 on the evidence from the crime scene. The DNA profile from the semen left by the killer was run through the FBI’s CODIS database. It did not match any of the three men convicted. Instead, it matched another, unrelated man who had been convicted of raping another woman in her home in the same county two years later.