Supreme Court: 24-hour deadline to produce a detained person before a magistrate starts at detention, not at formal arrest

The 24-hour deadline for police to produce a person before a magistrate starts the moment that person is detained, not when officers later write up a formal arrest, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, 5 November. A bench of Justices Ujjal Bhuyan and Atul S. Chandurkar said a split between ‘arrest’ and ‘detention’ has no place in the Constitution.

The bench held that reading the clock from the recorded arrest goes against Article 22(2) of the Constitution and against Section 56 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), the criminal procedure law that replaced the CrPC. Article 22(2) refers to every person “arrested and detained in custody”, and the judges treated the two words as one idea: the Constitution knows no detention that stands apart from arrest. A fundamental right, they said, cannot be suspended for a short spell of questioning.

Only travel time can be left out

The single period police may subtract from the 24 hours is the time needed to take the person from where they were picked up to the magistrate’s court. Hours spent on searches, seizures, inquiry or investigation before an arrest is entered in the records must be counted.

When a person is brought before them, magistrates must now write down when the detention really began, by date and hour, and count the deadline from there. If 24 hours have passed, the person must be set free at once. Even within the 24 hours, a magistrate may refuse remand if the custody ran longer than the facts justified, the bench said.

The court also held that earlier judgments of the Orissa, Madras and Kerala High Courts, which had let police leave pre-arrest detention out of the count, stated the law wrongly.

Four released in the Tripura case

The ruling came on appeals by four people whom the Tripura High Court had refused bail in a narcotics case involving the seizure of 11.03 kg of yaba tablets. They were held at 2 pm on 29 September 2025 during a search, but their arrest was recorded only at 11 am the next day. The Supreme Court said they had to be produced before a magistrate within 24 hours of that first detention, and ordered their immediate release.

Under Article 141 of the Constitution, the law declared by the Supreme Court binds every court in the country, including the magistrates who decide remand.