That order was a major breakthrough for the defense. The prosecution produced a huge amount of information during an eight-month period in 2013, much of it informant notes from other cases in which Perez had been a witness. Early on, Sanders says, it became clear that a former deputy DA and gang prosecutor, Erik Petersen, had planned to use Perez in several cases—but withheld almost all of Perez’s notes. The DA’s informant files on Perez were so thin they didn’t even have an entry for his work with Dekraai.