Boulder District Judge Nancy Salomone on Friday afternoon vacated the 2012 first-degree murder conviction of Michael Clark, setting in motion his release from prison on bail.

It is the first time a murder conviction has been set aside in the wake of the scandal that has embroiled the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s forensic lab for the past 18 months.

Clark, 49, has maintained his innocence for more than 30 years in the 1994 shooting death of Marty Grisham in Boulder. He was tried and convicted 18 years after the murder, in part due to testimony from a now-discredited former Colorado Bureau of Investigation forensic expert who linked his DNA to the crime scene.

Last month, an independent lab concluded that in some of its DNA retesting of the evidence, Clark was, in fact, excluded, which lent support to the defense’s claim that he was not at Grisham’s apartment the night he was shot.

In a court filing Friday, the Boulder County District Attorney’s office said that it no longer objected to vacating the conviction, and the judge then quickly did so.

While it continued to believe the evidence against Clark was “weighty” — and it did not agree that the defense arguments rose to the legal standard to overturn the conviction — the district attorney acknowledged that due to the “totality” of the issues surrounding the case, “it is in the interest of justice to vacate Defendant’s conviction at this time and grant Defendant a new trial.”

The district attorney’s office said in its filing Friday that it will now re-evaluate the evidence in the 30-year-old case, attempt to relocate witnesses, and “determine whether the case can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt at a second trial. A decision is expected in June.

Clark’s defense attorney Adam Frank said on Friday he will continue to press to have all charges dropped.

“This is a really good day,” he said in an interview. “But the fight is not over yet.”

Clark will be released from Fremont Correctional Facility in Florence in coming days and likely sent to Boulder County jail, where he will be held on $100,000 bond. Clark has been imprisoned for more than 12 years after being sentenced to life without parole.

The allegations swirling around past operations at the CBI forensic lab have become deeply intertwined in the Clark case.

At the center of the scandal is Yvonne Woods, once Colorado’s most revered and prolific DNA analyst at the state’s crime lab. Woods, who goes by the nickname Missy, is accused — and has partly admitted to — deleting data, skipping steps, and using faulty procedures in her analysis of crime evidence. She is also accused of giving false testimony at trials.

Of the more than 10,780 cases Woods handled in her 29-year career, CBI has acknowledged finding 1,003 irregularities in her work, or roughly one in 10 cases.

Notably, the Clark case was not among the 1,003 cases CBI identified as problem cases. That has led some in the judicial system to question the true scope of Woods’ alleged misconduct and its impact on defendants and crime victims alike.

Frank argued as far back as 2019 — four years before the scandal broke — that Woods’ DNA conclusions in his client’s case were wrong and that her testimony misled jurors.

At trial, Woods testified that Clark’s DNA matched a partial profile she developed from inside a jar of Carmex lip balm found at the scene the morning after the murder. She also said when looking at the DNA extracted, 99.4% of the male population could be excluded — but Clark could not.

Years later, as part of Frank’s motion to overturn the conviction, Phillip Danielson, a professor of forensic genetics at the University of Denver, reviewed Woods’ findings for the defense and wrote in an affidavit that her methods were suspect and that the DNA results in the Clark case should have been considered inconclusive or excluded him altogether.

At the time, the judge declined to allow a hearing to introduce questions about the effectiveness of Clark’s original defense lawyer, the validity of Woods’ testing, and evidence of juror misconduct. That decision was later overturned by the Colorado Court of Appeals in late 2023, and a hearing on the defense arguments was scheduled for late May.

Clark was a teenager when Grisham was killed and quickly considered a prime suspect. He once owned the same type of gun that was used, had talked about leaving town quickly to join the U.S. Marine Corps, and, most damning, he had stolen and forged checks from the victim.

While in custody on the check charges, a jailhouse informant also told authorities and later testified that Clark “kinda nodded” when asked if he did it, referring to killing Grisham. Clark told The Denver Gazette in a prison interview last year that the claim was absurd.

Although a leading suspect, Clark was not arrested for the murder at the time because there were no witnesses, no physical evidence and the murder weapon was never found.

Not until 2009, when Boulder police reopened the case, was new traction found. Forensic science had improved dramatically by then and the jar of Carmex, still stored in evidence, was sent to CBI for testing. It landed with Woods and her conclusions about the DNA found in the lip balm container led to Clark’s arrest and eventual conviction.

Woods’ DNA analysis was seen by prosecutors as the missing piece in a long unsolved puzzle.

But last fall, in light on the ongoing CBI scandal, Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty agreed the DNA evidence in the Clark case should be retested by Bode Technology, an independent lab in Virginia.

Results released in March by Bode showed it could not replicate Woods’ findings in some of its retests, according to the lab report attached to a recent defense filing in the case.

The Denver Gazette asked Danielson at DU and Laura Schile, a nationally known DNA forensic expert in Arizona, to review the Bode information in the defense filing and both said it was significant that Woods’ conclusions could not be consistently reproduced.

“Reproducibility is a hallmark of scientific reliability,” Danielson said.

Woods is awaiting trial on 102 felony charges including perjury, forgery, cybercrime and attempting to influence a public servant.