Boulder County District Judge Nancy W. Salomone on Monday ordered the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to provide access to thousands of cases where past DNA analysis could be in question or show a pattern.

The ruling came in a pre-trial hearing for Michael Clark who is standing trial for a second time in a 1994 Boulder murder case.

Clark, 50, was previously convicted largely on the strength of DNA analysis and testimony by now discredited CBI forensic scientist Yvonne Woods. That conviction was vacated when independent DNA testing revealed inconsistencies with Woods’ original findings.

Woods, who goes by Missy, is at the heart of an unprecedented scandal at the state forensic lab where she is accused of altering, deleting or otherwise compromising DNA results in criminal cases dating back decades.

CBI has acknowledged finding problems in 1,045 cases over the course of her 29-year career at the lab, or roughly 1-in-10 of the more than 10,780 cases she worked.

The Clark case is not included in identified problem cases by CBI and the prosecution on Monday argued that Woods had followed lab policy in her analysis at the time.

The defense, however, has indicated that is precisely why it is seeking the documents — to reveal patterns in Woods’ work that allegedly strayed beyond accepted scientific protocol but that were accepted at CBI.

Defense attorney Adam Frank argued for the massive trove of documents to bolster his claim “that the DNA-related conduct Ms. Woods committed in Mr. Clark’s case is part of a pattern that was authorized by CBI, not an outlier.”

Prosecutors called the request overly broad and irrelevant, as it sought to block the subpoena.

The Colorado Attorney General’s office, which represents CBI, also called the request irrelevant to the Clark case, as well as unduly burdensome, estimating it would take nearly 2,200 hours to sort through the cases to see if they matched the criteria the defense was seeking.

Frank offered, instead, that CBI move the 5,900 documents already identified by CBI as cases where Woods conducted DNA testing into a separate file that could then be searchable by keywords, including certain classifications and terms, to avoid the tedious work of going through them manually.

The judge, while initially questioning why the defense needed all of the files, in the end backed that alternative plan of a keyword search and gave CBI two weeks to comply. She did not rule on the question of relevancy.

Lisa McCarty, senior assistant attorney general representing CBI, indicated at the hearing her office would challenge the judge’s ruling.

The legal wrangling is part of the run-up to an anticipated motion by the defense to ask that the case against Clark be dismissed due to “outrageous governmental conduct” in light of the scandal at CBI.

The deadline for that argument is due May 1, Salomone said on Monday.

Clark was released on bond in April 2025 after spending 12 years in prison. In September, Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty announced he was retyring Clark for the now 31-year-old murder of Marty Grisham.

Grisham was shot to death Nov. 1, 1994, as he answered the door at his Boulder apartment. Clark, 19 at the time, was an immediate suspect because he admitted to stealing checks from the victim and forging them for a total of about $4,000.

For more than three decades, Clark has maintained his innocence. In the immediate aftermath of the murder, Boulder authorities acknowledged they did not have a solid enough case to bring charges against him.

The case found new life when Woods said in 2011 that Clark’s DNA was a major contributor to the profile she had developed from inside a container of Carmex lip balm recovered from the murder scene. The following year, Clark was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole, largely on the strength of Wood’s conclusions and testimony.

But then in 2023, the scandal at the CBI lab broke sending shock waves through the state’s judicial system.

Dougherty agreed to have the DNA in the Clark case retested. The new analysis by Bode Technology in Virginia “statistically excluded” Clark in a retest.

Frank argued in his court filing that his client had been wrongfully imprisoned “not simply because Ms. Woods was a bad actor, but because CBI itself was a bad actor as well.”

CBI director Armando Saldate III told The Denver Gazette last year that he had been assured that no other staff were involved in wrongdoing in the lab.

Earlier this month, Woods pleaded not guilty in Jefferson County to 102 felonies including cybercrime, perjury, forgery and attempting to influence a public servant. She was arrested in January 2025 and is out on bond as she awaits a trial scheduled for late September.

Boulder attorney Mary Claire Mulligan joined the defense team last year. She previously defended Garrett Coughlin, accused of triple homicide and whose case also involved DNA analysis by Woods.

In a June 2024 agreement, Coughlin pleaded guilty to the lesser charges of three counts of second-degree murder and agreed to serve 42 years in prison with credit for time already served rather than face a life sentence.

Coughlin’s first conviction in 2019 was overturned because of juror misconduct. The prosecution offered the plea deal rather than risk a second trial in light of the CBI scandal.