When Jason Zapata was booked into the Riverside County jail on suspicion of firing a gun into the air, deputies placed him in a dim, filthy cell with trash on the floor and a broken payphone bolted to the wall. Two much older men with shaved heads were already inside, eyeing the wristband that displayed his personal information. One stood over six feet tall and weighed roughly 300 pounds. The other was covered in tattoos from head to toe. Both claimed to be gang members doing time for murder.
It was 2015, and Zapata — a slim 24-year-old who stood 5-foot-9 and weighed about 180 pounds — had never been locked up before. His new cellmates told him they’d spent years cycling through some of the state’s toughest prisons. As they bragged about people they’d killed with knives, Zapata tried to hide how hard his heart was pounding.
“Your life is in their hands,” Zapata told CalMatters in a recent interview. “In that kind of environment, anything can happen to you. Not everybody makes it out. You have to do whatever it takes to survive.”
When the men pressed him about why he was in custody, Zapata tried to dodge the questions and insisted he was innocent. But as the hours dragged on, they accused him of disrespecting them by refusing to talk. Eventually, they threatened him with what’s known in jailhouse slang as a “calentada” — a beating or stabbing.
Three months later, Zapata learned the whole encounter had been staged. His cellmates were undercover operatives trying to extract information about an unsolved killing from the year before. It was what law enforcement calls a “Perkins operation” — a controversial tactic in which an officer or civilian informant poses as a fellow inmate to coax incriminating statements out of a suspect.
Perkins operations are widely used across California and have helped secure hundreds of murder convictions. Prosecutors describe them as a powerful investigative tool that can both solve crimes and clear the innocent. The tactic is so entrenched that law enforcement officials in Riverside County — a hub for these operations — routinely teach other agencies how to run them at conferences statewide.
But the practice is drawing increasing scrutiny from judges, legal scholars and defense attorneys, who argue it is coercive, risks producing false confessions, and disproportionately targets Black and Latino suspects.
A CalMatters review of cases in Los Angeles, San Diego, Riverside and Santa Clara counties found that Perkins operations have involved fabricated evidence, recording devices hidden inside jail cells, and cash payments to undercover operatives — known as Perkins agents — of up to $3,000 a day. Court records frequently describe these agents as older and physically larger than the people they’re targeting, often posing as seasoned gang members with histories of violence. In some cases, as many as five operatives have been placed in a cell with a single suspect.
“It’s psychological warfare,” said Michelle Luna Reynoso, a San Diego criminal defense attorney. “How is this not considered cruel and unusual punishment?”
‘It could happen to anyone’
Zapata grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Hawthorne, sharing a two-bedroom rental apartment with his parents and older sister. His father worked at Ford, his mother at Verizon. He loved his mom’s home cooking, skateboarding with friends near Venice Beach, and blasting Metallica and Tupac.
At 15, Zapata says he was the victim of a violent crime, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and shot multiple times. His family relocated to Temecula soon after. Their new two-story home, complete with a pool and a palm tree in the backyard, felt like a fresh start far from the old neighborhood. After high school, Zapata enrolled at a community college in San Diego, taking classes in law, business and auto mechanics. He later worked at a Mexican restaurant and bar and ran an eBay store selling electronics. Then, suddenly, he was in jail.
The two Perkins agents zeroed in on Zapata after a 15-year-old friend of the victim accused him of the 2014 killing. At the time, she was in custody on an unrelated matter and looking to cut a deal. She later admitted her statements weren’t true, according to court records.
Zapata repeatedly denied any involvement. But when the undercover agents began threatening him, he grew afraid of what might happen and told them what they wanted to hear. Still, he insists he never directly confessed to the killing.
A judge set his bail at $1 million. The case took roughly eight years to reach trial. When it finally did, prosecutors argued that his statements to the Perkins agents amounted to a confession. The jury agreed. In January 2024, Zapata was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 25 years.
“It was heartbreaking to hear the verdict,” Zapata said. “It could happen to anyone.”
Earlier this year, California’s Fourth District Court of Appeal overturned Zapata’s conviction, ruling that law enforcement violated his rights during the Perkins operation.
The decision, which granted Zapata a new trial, could have far-reaching consequences for similar cases. At least 10 Perkins-related appeals are currently pending before the California Supreme Court. Of those defendants, four are Latino, four are Black and two are white. The youngest was 18 at the time of the operation targeting him.
Many of these cases raise similar legal questions. Some defendants argue that Perkins agents talked them into waiving their Miranda rights — the right to remain silent or consult an attorney before formal police questioning. Others argue that agents coerced incriminating statements out of them after they had already invoked those rights.
A Miranda loophole
Perkins operations are defined largely by their timing: they typically occur after an arrest but before formal charges are filed. That window matters because once charges are filed, Sixth Amendment protections kick in, barring further questioning without an attorney present.
Fifth Amendment protections, including Miranda rights, are meant to ensure suspects aren’t interrogated in custody without being warned first. Those protections stem from the landmark 1966 U.S. Supreme Court case Miranda v. Arizona and are designed to prevent coercion in a police-dominated setting. Once invoked, all questioning is supposed to stop.
But roughly two decades later, the nation’s high court ruled that statements made during a Perkins-style operation are considered voluntary — meaning Miranda simply doesn’t apply.
That 1990 ruling grew out of the case of Lloyd Perkins, who was placed in an Illinois jail cell with an undercover officer and a jailhouse informant. The two drew him into a fake escape plot. While plotting the supposed breakout, they asked if he’d ever committed a crime. Perkins responded by implicating himself in a years-old murder. He later argued the statement shouldn’t have been admissible because he was never read his Miranda rights beforehand.
In an 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court disagreed, reasoning that as long as a suspect doesn’t know he’s speaking with a government agent, the coercive pressures of custodial interrogation don’t exist.
“When a suspect considers himself to be among cellmates and not officers, the coercive atmosphere is lacking,” former Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. “Miranda forbids coercion, not mere strategic deception by taking advantage of a suspect’s misplaced trust in one he supposes to be a fellow prisoner.”
Alexandra Natapoff, a Harvard Law School professor and one of the nation’s leading experts on confidential informants, said the ruling opened a significant gap in Miranda protections.
“Perkins operations are attempts by law enforcement to exploit a legal loophole to obtain confessions using informants, without the requirement of establishing that the suspect is actually being interrogated — in other words, without being pressured in a police-dominated environment to confess,” she said.
Natapoff said the broader use of jailhouse informants, and Perkins operations specifically, are coercive, dehumanizing and lack transparency.
“Perhaps the best-known problem with using informants — well known because it generates the most litigation — is their unreliability,” she said. “We know people falsely confess to crimes they didn’t commit because they feel the need to look tough, brag, or protect themselves from cellmates.”
But Greg Totten, chief executive of the California District Attorneys Association, said prosecutors weigh such statements within the context of the entire case.
“We look for corroboration, when we can find it, to make sure statements are inherently accurate and solid. We meet our obligation,” he said. “In the justice system, we have a responsibility not only to secure convictions, but also to protect innocent people from being prosecuted.”
‘They wouldn’t stop questioning me’
According to court records, the two Perkins agents investigating Zapata’s case shared a cell with him for a total of three hours and 20 minutes. The cell was monitored electronically in real time by James Dickey, an investigator with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office.
After roughly an hour without any breakthrough on the murder, Dickey pulled Zapata out of the cell and took him upstairs for a lineup, where witnesses view a series of individuals to determine whether any of them match a suspect. Back in the cell, Dickey falsely told Zapata that someone had identified him as the shooter.
According to court records, Dickey then asked Zapata if he wanted to talk about the murder. Zapata invoked his right to an attorney, saying he wouldn’t speak without one present.
When Dickey returned Zapata to the cell, he told him he would be charged with murder, then shut the cell door and walked away. No attorney was ever provided.
Dickey’s ploy was the first of at least three “bump” tactics law enforcement used against Zapata, according to court records. Because incarcerated people are often reluctant to openly discuss their charges, these tactics are designed to prompt conversation by introducing new information — fabricated DNA results, staged lineups, or surveillance footage — that officers like Dickey present to suspects, hoping they’ll unknowingly discuss the case with who they believe is a fellow inmate.
Iris Blandón-Gitlin, a psychology professor at Cal State Fullerton who studies Perkins operations, said the fake-evidence tactic is “a very dangerous technique” because it risks coercion, false confessions and misinformation.
“It manipulates people’s sense of reality,” she said. “And that’s why they believe it. They don’t understand it, but they believe it, and therefore they decide to confess, even if it’s a lie.”
According to court records, once the Perkins agents heard Dickey tell Zapata he’d be charged with murder, they immediately began bombarding him with questions.
“They wouldn’t stop questioning me,” Zapata testified at trial.
Zapata kept denying involvement, but according to trial transcripts reviewed by CalMatters, the agents told him they didn’t believe him and accused him of disrespecting them by withholding details. That’s when, Zapata said, they began threatening him with a beating.
“I had no doubt that I was in imminent danger… At that point I kept lying and saying what I said,” Zapata testified. “I wouldn’t have said what I said if it weren’t for the threats.”
When Dickey took the stand, he described what he observed from elsewhere in the jail, where he was watching a live feed of the operation.
“The atmosphere was positive,” he said. “I didn’t observe any aggressive or threatening behavior.”
But large portions of the recording were inaudible.
“In my opinion, this is a very poor-quality recording,” said Riverside County Superior Court Judge John Davis, who ultimately allowed portions of the tape to be admitted as evidence.
Hundreds of convictions
Zapata’s case unfolded roughly a year after Riverside County conducted its first Perkins operation. Since then, Dickey and others in the county’s law enforcement community have traveled the state training other agencies in the tactic.
In 2024, Dickey and Riverside County Deputy District Attorney David Tahan gave a presentation at a homicide symposium hosted by the Association of Deputy District Attorneys in Santa Rosa. Beyond their official titles, they identified themselves as their agencies’ “Perkins coordinators” and said they had conducted hundreds of operations across California.
CalMatters obtained the slide presentation through a California Public Records Act request filed by the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, which attended the symposium. That office initially declined to release the document, agreeing to do so only after attorneys from the law firm Covington & Burling sent demand letters on CalMatters’ behalf.
The 66-slide presentation showed that Riverside County conducted its first Perkins operation in 2014. Its program — which Dickey and Tahan described as “a statewide model” — runs multiple operations each week, roughly half of them on behalf of unnamed outside agencies. More than half of the operations involve gang-related homicides, according to the presentation.
Dickey and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department declined CalMatters’ request for an interview. Tahan and the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office did not respond to multiple interview requests.
The presentation included tips on recruiting operatives, scheduling arrests, and what Dickey and Tahan called “formulas for success.” They outlined the typical stages of an operation, beginning with planning meetings and recorded pre-briefings, followed by the operation itself, rehearsals, an interview, and a recorded post-operation debriefing. The process wraps up with “reporting and evidence review.”
Dickey and Tahan said Riverside County’s Perkins program was modeled after similar programs developed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and District Attorney’s Office, where such operations are especially common.
Public records obtained by CalMatters attorneys show the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office established uniform procedures for Perkins operations in February 2017. Former Assistant District Attorney John Spillane rolled out the new guidelines through a special directive requiring deputy district attorneys to complete filing checklists, pretrial discovery checklists and case-closing checklists for every Perkins operation.
Court records from a case pending before the California Supreme Court this year show that 85 of 400 Perkins-related murder convictions in Los Angeles County occurred after the suspect had invoked Miranda rights. That count reflects just one unit within the office, suggesting the actual number is likely far higher, according to the records.
“These operations generate conviction after conviction,” said Scott Sanders, a criminal defense attorney who exposed the illegal use of jailhouse informants in Orange County more than a decade ago. “It’s fertile ground for misconduct. These cases will reach the Supreme Court because it’s a fundamental question about how far law enforcement can go with these operations… These are the kinds of boundaries you’d think would be off-limits.”
A cellmate the size of a linebacker
The 10 pending Perkins-related petitions before the California Supreme Court come from San Diego, Riverside and Los Angeles counties. The oldest dates back to 2014.
One case involves Michael Goehner, who was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after 48 years for murder in March 2024. Goehner, who is white, has maintained his innocence since his arrest in August 2021, when he was 25. In his petition, he alleged that two Perkins agents repeatedly discouraged him from speaking with an attorney and instead coached him to claim self-defense when talking with authorities.
In another case, David Allen, who is Black, was arrested on suspicion of murder in 2016 in Los Angeles County when he was 28. During questioning, officers falsely told him they had clear evidence of his guilt, which Allen repeatedly denied.
After invoking his right to remain silent four times, court records show detectives illegally continued questioning him anyway. They told him he’d never see his daughter again “because he refused to tell the truth,” according to court documents. He eventually admitted to acting as a lookout during the shooting. But a prosecutor later told detectives his statement couldn’t be used at trial unless they could get Allen to repeat it to an undercover officer.
Three days later, Allen found himself in a cell with a man who identified himself as a gang member. Allen was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison after making incriminating statements to the Perkins agent. In a petition before the California Supreme Court, he argued his Fifth Amendment and federal due process rights were violated and asked that his conviction be overturned.
“By deliberately creating a coercive jail environment and inserting a large, gang-affiliated cellmate to induce the appellant into an incriminating conversation, law enforcement did exactly what these cases prohibit: they used deception and an intermediary to circumvent an already-invoked constitutional protection,” Allen’s attorney wrote in the petition.
The California District Attorneys Association and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office argued that Allen’s statements were voluntary and said Perkins operations benefit both prosecutors and defendants. In court filings, the office said such operations are “vital to the truth-seeking process” within its Conviction Review Unit, which examines innocence claims. Since that unit was created in 2015, the office has said roughly a third of its 16 exonerations stemmed from Perkins operations.
“In each of these cases, evidence obtained from Perkins operations completely demonstrated the innocence of the convicted defendant,” attorneys wrote. “These innocent people would not have been exonerated were it not for Perkins operations.”
But Jasmin Harris, policy director for the California Innocence Coalition, said the office has overstated the “success” of Perkins operations.
“It’s a stretch — one step too far — to claim this is some kind of tool when, really, they’re only using it to feel better about overturning a conviction after the petitioner has already met the legal burden,” she said. “We don’t believe deception should be used, either before or after a conviction.”
Racial disparities in who’s targeted
The California Public Defenders Association and the American Civil Liberties Union have urged the California Supreme Court to closely examine this highly coordinated police practice, arguing it produces extreme racial disparities
Original source: CalMatters
