The defense for a Colorado man who is being prosecuted in a 1994 Boulder killing said Friday that the decision to retry him after in 2025 was about politics, not justice.
A motion to dismiss the case filed Friday argues that District Attorney Michael Dougherty, who is running for Colorado Attorney General, chose to reprosecute Michael Clark in the interest of political supporters who were involved in the initial prosecution and investigation. The motion also argues that the continued prosecution violates Clark’s due process rights, in part because some evidence from the decades-old killing is no longer available.
Shannon Carbone, a spokesperson for the DA’s Office, said the office pursues justice “without fear or favor.” Dougherty requested the retest of DNA evidence that led to the overturning of Clark’s original conviction, she said.
“When decisions benefit his client, it appears the defense attorney is quite pleased with the integrity of the District Attorney’s Office. When decisions don’t go his clientap way, the attorney launches into a conspiracy theory,” Carbone said.
A status conference is set for 1:30 p.m. May 19 in the Boulder County Justice Center. The hearing, originally set for Tuesday, was moved to give parties time to consider next steps in the case, according to Adam Frank, Clark’s attorney.Clark, a 50-year-old who has maintained his innocence, served more than 12 years of a life prison sentence after he was convicted in 2012 of first-degree murder in the killing of Boulder city employee Marty Grisham. Clark’s conviction was overturned in 2025 after his attorneys found evidence that DNA testing in the case was mishandled by now-former Colorado Bureau of Investigation scientist Yvonne “Missy” Woods, one of several problems they found with the original murder prosecution.
Woods was charged in January with 102 felonies connected to widespread misconduct during DNA testing. Her case is pending.
Frank argued in the motion that Dougherty was acting in the interest of political allies when he decided to reprosecute Clark last year.Former Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle and former Boulder County Deputy District Attorney Ryan Brackley both have supported and donated to Dougherty’s campaign.
Pelle, who, as a Boulder Police Department sergeant, oversaw the detectives investigating the 1994 killing, endorsed Dougherty last year and donated a combined $750, according to the motion. It alleges Pelle’s “terrible investigative work significantly contributed” to Clark’s original conviction and that Dougherty is fighting that notion by prosecuting Clark again.
Brackley, who prosecuted Clark in 2012, has donated a combined $600 to Dougherty’s election campaign and hosted a fundraiser for the campaign, according to the motion. The motion alleges that Dougherty is reprosecuting Clark to verify claims Brackley made while representing Woods in her ongoing criminal case that she never “created or falsely reported any exculpatory DNA evidence or gave false testimony resulting in someone being wrongfully convicted or imprisoned.”
Frank also argued that evidence that could have proven Clark’s innocence has been lost over time.
Clark has maintained that he was on the phone at home when Grisham was killed. Boulder police didn’t obtain phone records that could have proven Clark’s alibi, Frank argues, and now, 32 years later, those records are no longer available.
Police also did not preserve dispatch audio in which officers are heard discussing a false alibi given to them by Grisham’s ex-wife and daughter – alternate suspects in the case. Additionally, detectives and witnesses can no longer remember facts relevant to the killing or its investigation decades later.
Grisham was shot and killed on Nov. 1, 1994, after he answered a knock at the door. Clark was always a suspect in the killing, but investigators initially only had circumstantial evidence against him.
It was Woods’ DNA testing of a Carmex lip balm container found at the scene that led prosecutors in 2012 to finally charge Clark in the cold case. Woods concluded that DNA in the lip balm tub excluded 99.4% of the world’s population, but could include Clark.
New testing conducted in 2025 found that it is 2.8 times more likely that random people contributed the DNA in the lip balm than Clark. The results could statistically exclude Clark from the DNA in the container, prosecutors acknowledged in court filings.
In 1994, investigators considered Clark a suspect in Grisham’s killing because he had access to a 9 mm gun — the same caliber weapon used in the killing — and because they alleged he stole blank checks from Grisham and wrote $4,500 in false checks from Grisham’s account.
Later, they alleged Clark, then 19, dreamed of joining the Marine Corps and believed he could not do so if he was caught committing check fraud, so he killed Grisham to cover it up. A jailhouse informant also later claimed Clark admitted to the killing while jailed in the check-fraud case.
Clark had been in Denver at 9 p.m. that night, then at his home in Boulder making phone calls to friends by 9:45 or 10 p.m., Frank has said. Investigators initially believed it was possible Clark shot Grisham at 9:34 p.m. that night, but “the timeline was very tight,” Frank wrote in a motion for post-conviction relief.
