considerable period of time and that by itself is a good ground for commutation of his sentence from death to life imprisonment. In this context, it was stated that the appellant was arrested on 18th February, 2001. He remained in custody until he was granted bail on 25 th January, 2002. He was again arrested when the Trial Court convicted him on 31st January, 2005 and since then he is continuously in custody having spent about 14 years in custody and about three years on bail. Consideration of socio-economic factors 15. There is no doubt that the socio-economic factors relating to a convict should be taken into consideration for the purposes of deciding whether to award life sentence or death sentence. One of the reasons for this is the perception (perhaps misplaced) that it is only convicts belonging to the poor and disadvantaged sections of society that are awarded capital sentence while others are not. Although Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab2 does not allude to socio-economic factors for being taken into consideration as one of the mitigating factors in favour of a convict, the development of the law in the country, particularly through the Supreme Court, has introduced this as one of the factors to be taken into consideration. In fact, in Bachan Singh this Court recognised that a range of factors exist and could be taken into consideration and accepted this 2 (1980) 2 SCC 684 R.P. (Crl.) No.245 of 2010 in Crl. Appeal No. 811 of 2009 Page 8 of 19