'Enough pain' for death pact survivor

Survivors of suicide pacts should not be sent to jail because they have suffered enough, a barrister argued yesterday.

Karaoke hostess Wong Lai-wah, 38, faces a prison term after pleading guilty to the manslaughter of Cheung Tak-loi, 53.

The pair made a pact to kill themselves after becoming embroiled in an unhappy love triangle. They took sleeping pills and brandy on or about July 19 last year at Wong's home on Kwun Chung Street, Yau Ma Tei, before inhaling charcoal fumes.

Defence barrister Keith Oderberg yesterday urged Mrs Justice Verina Bokhary to spare his client a jail term. 'There is very little point in sending this woman to prison,' he said.

He told the Court of First Instance that Wong had wanted to die when she committed the offence and that sending her to prison because she had survived the pact defied logic. She had suffered enough, he said.

Wong first met Cheung in 1998, when she worked at a nightclub in which he was a shareholder. Cheung had been living with another woman for 10 years at that time, prosecutor Frederic Whitehouse said. The love triangle eventually led to quarrels.