It's been pointed out numerous times that people do not always make rational decisions.  That feelings and emotions have a much more substantial hold on our decision making than reason does.  Even people carefully trained in reason and logic can be motivated to do unreasonable things.

Take this case, for example.

A surgeon, presumably someone who has at least brushed up against something resembling reason, kills his wife and spends the rest of his life in prison.

As he nears the end of his life, he finds himself more and more willing to confront what he did.  He HAD maintained his innocence all this time, but now, he makes statements that border on confession:

“You look back, you know, it’s you can’t believe how sometimes things happen that you did that it was completely unnecessary,” Dr. Friedgood said in a recent interview from prison. “If you don’t want to be with a woman anymore, you divorce. You know, you don’t have to resort to murder. So 32 years later, I begin to realize how stupid you can do things.”

There's not enough information in the article about why he chose murder over divorce.  Probably a little bit of lots of different reasons.  He would have gotten more money out of getting away with murder.  He wouldn't have to suffer the public shame of divorce either.  And certainly, he would rather be the sympathetic character of a bereaved husband; than subject to the derision of society as a man who divorced his invalid wife.

But how does a man who is, at the very least, of average intelligence, who has superior mental training and education, come to the decision that it is better to kill your wife than divorce her?  And what sustains someone for decades and decades in prison, still able to claim innocence until the very end, where even so, the best he can muster is an admission that killing his wife was "unecessary" and "stupid".

The article seems to think he should be paroled to save taxpayers money for his medical expenses, and because he's old.  I'm thinking that he needs to stay in there as long as he merely sees murder as an "inapporopriate" alternative to divorce.