The Supreme Court has held that
life imprisonment is the rule and death penalty an exception. The apex court advised the courts to consider socio-economic compulsions such as poverty while awarding the extreme sentence to a convict. The observations of the court came yesterday in a judgement delivered by a bench of Justices S.J.Mukhopadhya and Kurian Joseph in which it commuted the death sentence into life imprisonment of a man who was convicted for killing his wife and two sons.