Cayla Mihalovich/calmatters, The associated Press

When Jason Zapata was arrested for allegedly firing a gun into the air, he was thrown in a dimly lit holding cell with trash strewn across the floor and a broken payphone on the wall. It had nothing more than a rusted toilet, sink and three wooden benches that looked as though they had never been cleaned.

Two older men with shaved heads sat in the back, eyeing the 24-year-old’s wristband that the jail used to display his personal information. One was over 6 feet tall and 300 pounds. The other was covered in tattoos from head to foot. They were gang members, they said, in jail for murder.

It was 2015 and Zapata, a slight Hispanic man at 5 feet 9 inches tall and 180 pounds, had never been incarcerated before. His new cellmates in the Riverside County jail told him they had spent years in and out of the most violent prisons. As they boasted about the people they had stabbed to death, Zapata tried to hide how fast his heart was beating.

“Your life is in their hands,” Zapata told CalMatters in a recent interview. “Anything could happen to you in that type of environment. Not everybody makes it out. You gotta do what you need to do to survive in this place.”

When they pressed him about why he was in jail, he tried to tread lightly as he maintained his innocence. But as the hours wore on, the men accused him of disrespecting them by not coming clean. Eventually, they threatened him with a “calentada” — Spanish prison slang for a beating or stabbing.

Three months later, Zapata learned it was all a ruse: His cellmates were undercover law enforcement agents attempting to obtain information about an unsolved murder from the previous year. They were part of what is known as a “Perkins operation,” a controversial law enforcement tactic in which a police officer or civilian poses as an incarcerated person to elicit incriminating statements from a suspect.

Perkins operations are widespread in California and have helped secure hundreds of murder convictions. District attorneys say they are a powerful investigative tool that can exonerate people or solve crimes. The tactic is so popular that law enforcement officials from Riverside County, a hotbed of Perkins operations, share tips on how to conduct them at conferences around the state.

But the operations are under increasing scrutiny from judges, scholars and defense attorneys, who say they are coercive, risk false confessions, and disproportionately target Black and Latino people.

A CalMatters analysis of cases in Los Angeles, San Diego, Riverside and Santa Clara counties shows that Perkins operations include false evidence ploys, jail cells outfitted with recording devices, and cash payments of up to $3,000 per day to undercover operatives, also known as Perkins agents. The agents, often described in court filings as older and physically larger than their targets, frequently presented themselves as experienced gang members with a history of violence. In some cases, as many as five were placed in a cell with one person.

“It’s psychological war,” said Michelle Luna Reynoso, a criminal defense attorney in San Diego. “How is this not considered cruel and unusual punishment?”

‘It could happen to anybody’

Zapata grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Hawthorne. He lived with his parents and older sister in a two-bedroom rental. His father worked at Ford and his mother worked at Verizon. He loved her home-cooked meals, skateboarding with friends through Venice Beach, and listening to Metallica and Tupac.

But when he was 15, Zapata said he was a victim of a violent crime. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. After being shot multiple times, his family moved to Temecula. Their new two-story home, with a pool and palm tree in the backyard, made him feel as though he had made it out of the hood. After high school, he attended community college in San Diego and enrolled in classes on law, business and auto maintenance. He later worked at a Mexican bar and grill, and started an eBay store to sell electronics. And then, suddenly, he was in jail.

The two Perkins agents targeted Zapata after a 15-year-old friend of the victim accused him of the crime. At the time, she was in custody on an unrelated matter and seeking a deal. She later admitted that her statements were not true, according to court records.

Zapata repeatedly denied involvement. But when the agents threatened him, he feared what they might do, so he told them what they wanted to hear. Still, he says, he never directly admitted to the killing.

A judge set his bail at $1 million. It took roughly eight years for his case to finally come to trial. When it did, prosecutors said his statements to the Perkins agents amounted to a confession. The jury agreed. He was sentenced to 25 years to life for murder in January 2024.

“It was heartbreaking to hear the verdict,” Zapata said. “It could happen to anybody.”

Earlier this year, California’s 4th District Court of Appeal reversed Zapata’s conviction after finding that law enforcement violated his rights during the Perkins operation.

The ruling, which granted Zapata a new trial, could have wide-ranging implications for other Perkins cases, at least 10 of which are now stacked before the California Supreme Court. Of those, four defendants are Hispanic, four are Black and two are white. The youngest was 18 years old at the time of the Perkins operation.

Many of the cases center on similar issues. In some, defendants allege that Perkins agents coaxed them to waive their Miranda rights to remain silent or consult an attorney before a formal police interrogation. In others, defendants argue agents coerced them into making incriminating statements after they repeatedly invoked their Miranda rights.

California has seen previous legislative and legal challenges to Perkins operations, but its high court has never intervened.

In 2019, the California Supreme Court rejected a petition to review the case of a Kern County man who was targeted in a Perkins operation one day after he invoked his Miranda rights in a police interrogation.

Although the court declined to hear the case, Justice Goodwin Liu had harsh words for law enforcement.

“The use of deceptive schemes to elicit confessions from suspects who have invoked their Miranda rights appears to be a pervasive police practice in California,” he wrote. “How is it possible, one might ask, that the protections of Miranda are so easily evaded?”

The Miranda loophole

Perkins operations are distinct because of their timing: They typically take place after a person has been arrested and before charges are filed. That timing is critical, because once someone has been formally charged, Sixth Amendment rights kick in and the person cannot be interrogated without a lawyer present.

Protections under the Fifth Amendment, including Miranda rights, guarantee that a suspect will not be subject to custodial interrogation without a warning. Those protections, resulting from the famous 1966 United States Supreme Court case Miranda v. Arizona, are designed to guard against coercion in a police-dominated environment. Once invoked, all interrogation must stop.

But roughly two decades later, the court held that statements made by a suspect during a Perkins operation are voluntary; therefore, Miranda does not apply.

The 1990 ruling hinged on the case of Lloyd Perkins, who was placed in an Illinois jail cell with an undercover police officer and an incarcerated informant. They roped him into a fake plan to escape from jail. As their planning was underway, they asked him if he had ever “done” anybody. He responded by implicating himself in a murder that took place years earlier. Perkins later argued that his statements should not have been admissible because he was not advised of his Miranda rights beforehand.

In an 8-to-1 decision, the high court disagreed. So long as suspects do not know they are speaking with a government agent, justices reasoned, the pressures that exist in a custodial interrogation are absent.

“When a suspect considers himself in the company of 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 professor at Harvard Law School and one of the nation’s leading experts on confidential informants, said the decision created a loophole in Miranda.

“Perkins operations are efforts by law enforcement to take advantage of the loophole to get confessions by using informants, without triggering a finding that the suspect is actually being interrogated — in other words, being pressured in a police-dominated atmosphere to confess,” she said.

Natapoff said the use of informants and Perkins operations, in particular, are coercive, inhumane and lack transparency.

“Maybe the most famous problem with the use of informants — famous because it gets litigated the most — is the unreliability,” she said. “We know that people falsely confess to crimes they didn’t do because they feel like they need to posture or brag or protect themselves from their cellmates.”

But Greg Totten, chief executive officer of the California District Attorneys Association, said prosecutors view statements in the context of the overall case.

“We look for corroboration, when we can find it, to make sure that the statements are intrinsically accurate and sound. We do our due diligence,” he said. “In the justice system, we have a responsibility not just to secure convictions but to protect the innocent from being prosecuted.”

‘They wouldn’t stop questioning me’

The two Perkins agents in Zapata’s case shared a cell with him for a total of three hours and 20 minutes, according to court records. The cell was electronically monitored in real-time by James Dickey, a Riverside County Sheriff’s investigator.

After about an hour, the Perkins agents had not obtained any information about the murder, so Dickey pulled Zapata out of the cell. He took him upstairs and had him stand in a police lineup. On his way back to the cell, Dickey told Zapata that somebody had identified him as the shooter. It was a lie.

According to court records, Dickey asked Zapata whether he wanted to speak with him about the murder. At that point, Zapata invoked his right to legal counsel, saying he would not talk without an attorney present.

When Dickey returned Zapata to his cell, he announced he would be charging him with murder. He closed the cell door and walked away. No lawyer was provided.

Dickey’s gambit was the first of at least three so-called stimulation tactics that law enforcement used on Zapata, according to court records. Because people in jail are often reticent to openly discuss their charges, the ploys are intended to “stimulate” conversation by introducing new information. That can include fabricated DNA results, lineups or video surveillance that officers like Dickey present to suspects to get them to unwittingly talk about the case with the person they think is their cellmate.

Iris Blandón-Gitlin, a psychology professor at California State University Fullerton who studies Perkins operations, said the false evidence ploy is a “very dangerous tactic” because it risks coercion, false confessions and erroneous information.

“It manipulates people’s reality,” she said. “And so they believe it. They don’t understand it, but they believe it and so they choose to confess — even falsely.”

When the Perkins agents overheard Dickey say Zapata would be charged with murder, they immediately began peppering him with questions, according to court records.

“They wouldn’t stop questioning me,” Zapata testified at trial.

Zapata continued to deny the allegations, but according to court transcripts reviewed by CalMatters, the agents told him they didn’t believe him and said he was disrespecting them by not divulging details. That was when Zapata said they began to threaten him with a “calentada.”

“There was no doubt in my mind that I was in imminent danger … At that point I continued to lie and say what I said,” Zapata said. “I wouldn’t have said what I said if it wasn’t for the threats.”

When Dickey took the stand, he described his observations from across the jail, where he was watching a live feed of the operation.

“The atmosphere was upbeat,” he said. “Aggressive is not anything that I observed. Threatening was not anything I observed.”

But many parts of the recording were inaudible.

“It’s, in my view, a very poor quality tape,” said Riverside County Superior Court Judge John Davis, who eventually allowed portions of the tape to be admitted.

Hundreds of convictions

Zapata’s case unfolded about a year after Riverside County’s first Perkins operation. Since then, Dickey and others in the Riverside County District Attorney’s office have traveled the state to train law enforcement on the tactic.

In 2024, Dickey and Riverside County Deputy District Attorney David Tahan delivered a presentation at a Deputy District Attorney Association Homicide Symposium in Santa Rosa. Along with their formal titles, they introduced themselves as the “Perkins coordinator” for their respective agencies and said they had conducted hundreds of operations throughout California.

CalMatters obtained their slide presentation through a California Public Records Act request from the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office, which attended the symposium. The office initially refused to release the document, agreeing to make it public only after attorneys from the Covington & Burling law firm wrote demand letters on CalMatters’ behalf.

The presentation reveals that Riverside County conducted its first Perkins operation in 2014. Its Perkins operation program, which Dickey and Tahan referred to as “a state model,” runs multiple operations each week — approximately half of which are conducted for unnamed outside agencies. Over half of the operations involve gang-related murders, they said.

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 66-slide presentation included recommendations for recruiting agents, how to time arrests and “recipes for success.” Dickey and Tahan outlined the steps in an operation, starting with meetings and recorded pre-briefs. From there, the operation begins, stimulations follow, then an interview, and a recorded debrief. It concludes with “proper reporting / discovery.”

According to Dickey and Tahan, Riverside County Perkins operations are modeled after programs developed by the sheriff’s department and district attorney’s office in Los Angeles County, where the operations are prolific.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office established uniform procedures for Perkins operations in February 2017, according to public records obtained by CalMatters attorneys. Former Chief Deputy District Attorney John Spillane announced the new procedures in a special directive, requiring that deputies submit a filing checklist, pretrial discovery checklist and case closing checklist for all Perkins operations.

Court records from a case filed before the California Supreme Court this year show that 85 out of 400 murder convictions involving Perkins operations in Los Angeles County occurred after a suspect had invoked their Miranda rights. That accounting was from just one of several units within the office, suggesting the number is likely much higher, according to the records.

“These operations produce 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 a really rich zone for tons of misconduct. These cases are going to the Supreme Court because it’s an issue that is paramount to understanding how far law enforcement can go in these operations … These are the lines that you would think are too far.”

‘A linebacker sized’ cellmate

All 10 Perkins challenges before the California Supreme Court come from San Diego, Riverside and Los Angeles counties. The earliest dates to 2014.

One involves Michael Goehner, who was sentenced to 48 years to life in prison 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 to an attorney and instead advised him to claim self-defense when he spoke with law enforcement.

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 an interrogation, officers lied and told him they had clear evidence he was guilty, which Allen repeatedly denied.

After he invoked his right to remain silent four times, court records show detectives unlawfully continued their interrogation. They told him he wouldn’t see his daughter again “because (he) refused to tell the truth,” according to court filings. He eventually admitted he had acted as the lookout during the shooting. But his statements could not be used in court, a prosecutor later told the detectives, “unless Allen could be made to repeat the statement to an undercover police agent.”

Three days later, Allen found himself in a cell with a man who introduced himself as a gang member. Allen was convicted of murder and sentenced to 45 years to life in prison after making incriminating statements to the Perkins agent. In a petition to the California Supreme Court, he argued that his Fifth Amendment and federal due process rights were violated and called for his convictions to be reversed.

“By deliberately creating a coercive jailhouse setting and inserting a linebacker-sized ‘gang’ cellmate to draw appellant into incriminating discussion, law enforcement did precisely what these cases forbid: It used deception and a proxy to bypass an already-triggered constitutional protection,” Allen’s attorney wrote in the petition.

The California District Attorneys Association and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office maintained Allen’s statements were voluntary, and argued that Perkins operations can benefit both the prosecution and the defense. In court filings, the office said the operations are “vital to the truth-finding process” in its Justice Conviction Review Unit, which reviews claims of innocence. Since the unit opened in 2015, the office claimed roughly one third of its 16 exonerations resulted from Perkins operations.

“In each of these cases, the evidence from Perkins operations completely proved the convicted defendant’s innocence,” attorneys wrote. “These innocent individuals would not have been exonerated but for the Perkins operations.”

But Jasmin Harris, director of policy for the California Innocence Coalition, said the office has misrepresented the ‘success’ of Perkins operations.

“It’s quite a stretch — a step too far — for them to claim that this is a tool when, really, it’s just a tool for them to feel better about reversing a conviction after the petitioner has met the legal standard,” she said. “We don’t think that deception should be used on the front side or the back side of a conviction.”

Racial disparities in who’s targeted

The California Public Defenders Association and American Civil Liberties Union urged the California Supreme Court to look closely at the highly coordinated police practice because they say it produces extreme racial disparities and perpetuates racially biased policing.

“Perkins operations are often framed as ‘gang’ investigations, which have long been directed at historically over-policed communities of color,” attorneys wrote in a brief filed in support of Allen.

They cited recent data from Riverside County Public Defender’s Office, which found significant racial disparities when it analyzed 881 murder cases between January 2015 and June 2023, including 145 Perkins targets. The analysis showed Black defendants were more than four times as likely to be targeted in a Perkins operation than white defendants. Latino defendants were targeted at over twice the rate of white defendants, they found.

Martín Flores, a gang expert who specializes in Perkins operations, has testified in more than 100 cases throughout San Diego, Riverside, Orange, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties that involved an operation. He said agents present themselves as “active, older homies with influence in the county jail and in the streets.”

“It’s someone who, in perception, can make your life miserable or harmful in the county jail,” he said. “In my opinion, most of these Perkins operations, it’s about impressing that agent…And why does that matter? Because it’s survival. If you look weak and vulnerable, you’re going to become the prey.”

Public defenders in San Diego have also voiced concern over racial bias in Perkins operations. In an analysis of roughly 40 Perkins operations, they found agents consistently used racially discriminatory language, including slurs and cultural stereotyping, to develop a false sense of rapport and generate incriminating statements.

Those findings were raised in the case of Adrian Rodriquez, a young Hispanic man who was in juvenile detention for violating his probation in May 2023. Rodriquez, then 18, was transferred to an adult jail, where he shared a cell with two Perkins agents who identified themselves as gang members. One had devil horn tattoos across his bald head and said he had stabbed his cellmate 70 times while serving time in federal prison for attempted murder, according to court filings.

Law enforcement later told Rodriquez that he had been booked for murder. His case has not yet gone to trial and he has pleaded not guilty.

In October 2025, Rodriquez filed California’s first-ever Racial Justice Act petition regarding a Perkins operation. The law, passed in 2020, allows people to challenge a prosecution, conviction or sentence that they believe was based upon racial bias. The San Diego Superior Court last month found that Rodriquez met his burden to proceed to an evidentiary hearing.

In his petition, Rodriquez argued that the Perkins agent exhibited bias toward him by exploiting his Latino identity, leading him to make incriminating statements. It detailed how an agent used “racialized manipulation” during the operation, including the use of the n-word nearly 70 times.

An expert analysis included in his petition found that Hispanic defendants in San Diego County are twice as likely to be targeted in a Perkins operation compared to white defendants. The odds go up for Hispanic teenagers, according to court filings, which said they are seven times more likely to be the subject of a Perkins operation compared to white teenagers.

San Diego District Attorney Summer Stephan told CalMatters in an interview that Perkins operations “are applied across the board, wherever it appears that a heartless murder can benefit…no matter what the race, what the gender, what the orientation, what the cultural background or anything is.”

She said Perkins operations, if done meticulously, are one of the best tools to pursue the truth. The operation is resource-intensive, she said, which means that everything must be done by the book.

“Like every tool that is available to pursue justice, it can be misused,” she said. “You can take almost any tool and if you don’t do it correctly and by the book, you’re going to mess it up. It’s not a reflection on the investigative tool being used, it’s a reflection on the people using it and that they’re not using it correctly.”

Zapata awaiting new trial

Roughly a decade after Zapata found himself in a cell with two Perkins agents, he was granted a new trial. The 4th District Court of Appeal ruled his statements should not have been admitted at trial. Zapata said he was speechless. He paced around his cell as he read through the decision.

“When a suspect invokes and does not waive the right to counsel, and a known law enforcement officer continues to ‘stimulate’ a Perkins operation in a manner that amounts to a custodial interrogation, the suspect’s resulting incriminating statements are inadmissible,” the justices wrote.

One month later, the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office requested that the California Supreme Court throw out the appellate opinion, arguing that it contradicts settled case law and creates confusion.

On May 13, the California Supreme Court rejected the request. That means Zapata will soon be transported from prison to a Riverside County jail where he will await a new trial.

Zapata said it is a win for now. He is trying to stay positive, knowing that he is returning to a county where he believes misconduct runs rampant.

“I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get a fair trial when I go back,” he said. “I’m fighting for my life at this point. I know I’m innocent so the truth shall set me free. I’m hoping that when I get there, they recognize it and act accordingly. Hopefully, I’ll be able to be home soon.”

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Robert Meeks contributed to this story.

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This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

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