Winans said he proposed a double suicide.

The former Wall Street Journal reporter, on trial in New York for conspiracy and stock fraud, testified that he suggested that he and his roommate kill themselves rather than face a federal investigation. But David Carpenter declined, and Winans later decided “that I wanted to live,” he testified. R. Foster Winans, Carpenter and stockbroker Kenneth P. Felis are on trial for allegedly trading stocks on advance information from the Journal’s Heard on the Street column.