Twenty-eight-year-old Au Shuk-lam earlier pleaded guilty to intentionally wounding the ex-boyfriend whom she had been dating for seven years in a flat on Hip Wo Street in Kwun Tong on March 11 last year. 

When passing sentence in District Court today, deputy judge Merinda Chow Yin-chu pointed out that Au was a nurse and must know how the sleeping pills work and that the aorta – the largest artery in a person's body – passes through the neck. Therefore, Chow ruled that Au plotted her crime beforehand. 

The court earlier heard that Au broke up with her ex because of disagreement in wedding arrangements and differences in value systems. 

Au claimed she headed to her ex's Kwun Tong home to collect her personal items that day and planned initially to drug her ex to sleep, after which she would kill herself in bed, and her ex would later wake up right next to a dead body. 

However, after drugging her ex, Au found that he was using a new wallet, in which he even kept a photo taken with another woman. Au was enraged and felt betrayed and stabbed her ex in the neck by the right before plunging the knife into her stomach. 

Chow noted that Au sustained 49 stitches and her ex nine stitches after the incident. Still, Chow added she couldn't tell if the ex wrote several mitigation letters for Au because he had forgiven Au already or because he was sorry for dumping Au. 

In mitigation, the defense stressed that Au brought to knife to commit suicide and had no plan to wound her ex. The lawyer said that Au committed the crime out of impulse, and she bled profusely after hurting herself, losing up to one liter of blood. 

However, Chow rejected the explanation and continued that Au should feel lucky the prosecution didn't throw other heftier charges at Au. 

Chow then discounted Au's jail term by one-third to four years upon her guilty pleas, as she stressed that violence was never the solution to any problem.