Nayeri

Hossein Nayeri, the 41-year-old Newport Beach man who was convicted last year of playing a role in the kidnapping and mutilation of a medical marijuana dealer, was sentenced Friday to life in prison without parole for what a prosecutor described as “diabolical” behavior.Prosecutors said the 2012 crime stemmed from Nayeri’s mistaken belief that the owner of a prosperous Santa Ana pot dispensary, who has been referred to in court as John Doe, had hidden $1 million in the Mojave Desert. Nayeri and two other attackers…

When the burning metal rod sank into his shoulder, K passed out to the sound of his own screams. He sensed more burning wounds on his back when he came round. It was August 2009 and he was in a government interrogation room in Sri Lanka. K’s torturers kept asking him where the gold was that he hid for the Tamil Tigers. “I swear I don’t know,” he told them. “I’m not LTTE . I’m a jeweller’s assistant.” They poured petrol over his wounded body and threatened to set it alight unless he told them what they wanted to know.Or…

The question driving Dina Nayeri’s latest book, “who gets believed?”, is deceptively simple. The Iranian-American novelist, once a child refugee, weaves stories from her own life with those people who were wrongly denied asylum in the UK and US. In doing so, she shows how “the accident of birth, the privilege of race, class, and nationality” often trumps “data, history, science, and reason” when it comes to whose voices are heard, and whose truths acknowledged. The consequences can be devastating.The book is instantly…