DPP v Lam

[2007] VSC 307

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF VICTORIA Not Restricted

AT MELBOURNE

CRIMINAL DIVISION

No. 1410 of 2007

THE DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROSECUTIONS

v

HOA BOA LAM

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JUDGE:	Teague J
WHERE HELD:	Melbourne
DATE OF HEARING:	25, 30 July 2007
DATE OF SENTENCE:	27 August 2007
CASE MAY BE CITED AS:	DPP v Lam
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION:	[2007] VSC 307

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Criminal law – Sentencing – Murder of wife by stabbing – 18 years imprisonment – 13 years non-parole period

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APPEARANCES:	Counsel	Solicitors
For the Crown	Mr B. Kayser	Office of Public Prosecutions
For the Accused	Mr P. Dunn QC with Ms S. Cure	Grigor Lawyers

HIS HONOUR:

1. Hoa Boa Lam, you have pleaded guilty to the murder of your wife Vo Thi Vo at St Albans on 9 March 2006.  She died of stab wounds inflicted by you at her and your home.  An especially tragic feature of the murder was that it was carried out while the three young children of the marriage were in the house, in a bedroom nearby.

1. Both you and your wife were born in Vietnam.  Both of you retained strong family ties, although neither was raised in a traditional family way.  There were significant differences in your life histories prior to the two of you meeting and marrying in 1995.  Your wife came to Australia at the age of 9.  She was nurtured here, well educated, and well settled until she met you.  You came to Australia when you were in your mid-twenties.  You had received very little education in Vietnam.  Your English-language skills were and still are poor.  Effectively, your only capacity for work came from the use of your hands.  Three children were born to the two of you between 1995 and 2004. 

1. Your inability to earn a good income led you to join the company of people who chose to traffick illegal drugs.  In time, those associations led to your being sentenced to prison in Western Australia.  While you were engaged in the drug trafficking and in prison, your wife looked after the three children.  During the time that you were away from her, she came to know another man, and then to enjoy his company and then to enjoy his company intimately.  It seems that he enjoyed her company too, but was conscious of his own family responsibilities.  It seems that he told her that there was no future for the two of them.  However, even up until the night of the stabbing, there were many and long phone calls between the two.  The link that your wife established with the other man appears to have satisfied her that there was no future for her with you.

1. You were released from prison in Western Australia on 21 February 2006.  You were released on parole to be of good behaviour.  You rejoined your wife in Melbourne.  You had plans for the future that involved her.  It soon became clear that your wife’s plans for the future no longer involved you.  You started to probe her and others about the other man.  You became depressed.  You also became obsessed with finding out more about the other man.  You became progressively less rational.  You foolishly chose to resort to the illegal drug “ice”. That choice could only have worsened your emotional state.  On a separate occasion before the fatal night, you took up a knife and you threatened your wife at knifepoint.  That worrying and serious action led to her excluding you from the house.  But she relented, and on the fatal night you and she were together at the house.

1. As to what passed between you that night, we have only your account to the police to add to the forensic picture.  What seems to have been troubling you most was her silence in the face of your pressure to know more about the other man.  As to matters other than a persistent silence on her part, you said to the police only that at one stage she slapped you.  You did not claim to have lost self-control as a result of the slap or otherwise.  The notion of there having been the kind of provocation that could cause an ordinary man to lose self-control is quite unsupportable. 

1. On what you said to the police, you had not got from your wife what you wanted.  So you then did part of what you had planned and earlier threatened to do. You stabbed her to death.  You then tried to take your own life, by inadequate attempts to inflict fatal stab wounds, to hang yourself and to blow yourself up.

1. I have read the two victim impact statements that were filed on the hearing of the plea.  There were prepared by the aunt and cousin by and with whom your wife was raised in Sydney.  They both refer to the depth of their feelings of loss.

1. I have also read the report of Dr Kaylene Evers with its attachments.  I read it after I had drafted these sentencing comments, with the terms of imprisonment and parole eligibility to be imposed included. I subsequently made no change to those terms.  I  nonetheless found the experience of reading the materials so difficult.  It compelled reflection as to the sanctity of life and the importance of having a mother, and as to the tendency to self-blame, and yet the blamelessness, of young children.

1. You are 38 years of age having been born in October 1968.  I have referred to some aspects of your background.  Further details are set out in the reports of the psychiatrist Dr Danny Sullivan and the  psychologist, Carla Lechner, who examined you in respectively, December 2006 and July 2007.  In short, you were born in Saigon to parents of Chinese background.  Your early life was spent in a war-torn Vietnam.  During the 1980’s you made many attempts to escape from Vietnam.  You got out in 1990, but only to a refugee camp. A family link enabled you to come to Melbourne in 1993.

1. There are a number of mitigating factors operating in your favour.  You have pleaded guilty.  Although the plea was not entered at the earliest stage, there were factors, including as to language, which made that explicable.  You have at all times co-operated with the authorities.  You have expressed, and have demonstrated, remorse. You were suffering depression at the time of the stabbing.  You continue to so suffer.  Indeed, you continue to need monitoring for self-harm.  Your prior convictions, although troubling for other reasons, are not for violence.  I would alert you to the importance of your making an appropriate timely application to the Western Australian authorities as to that parole obligation.  The sentence that you serve will be the harder given your fragile mental state, and given that you are unlikely to see your mother again, or to have any, or other than a minimal role in the upbringing of your children.

1. I declare that there are 536 days of pre-sentence detention.  I direct that that be entered in the court records.  There being no opposition to my doing so, I have signed the retention and disposal orders placed before me on the plea.  I impose a sentence of 18 years imprisonment. I fix a non-parole period of 13 years.