New Delhi, The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the 24-hour constitutional deadline for producing an arrested person before a magistrate begins from the moment he is detained, and not from the time the police formally makes the arrest.
Holding that there can be no artificial distinction between ‘arrest’ and ‘detention’ for the purpose of Article 22 of the Constitution, a bench of Justices Ujjal Bhuyan and Atul S Chandurkar said any interpretation allowing the police to exclude the period of pre-arrest detention would be contrary to the constitutional mandate. The verdict that the only period that can be excluded while computing the 24-hour deadline is the time reasonably required to travel from the place of arrest to the magistrate’s court. Article 22 provides that every person, who is arrested and detained in custody must be produced before the nearest magistrate within 24 hours of arrest, excluding the time necessary for the journey from the place of arrest to the court.
The top court disapproved of the views taken by the Orissa High Court in the Aryaman Pattanaik case, the Madras High Court in the Kannan case and the Kerala High Court in the Arun K Thomas case, which had permitted the period of detention before formal arrest to be excluded while calculating the 24-hour deadline. The time spent on inquiry, investigation, search or seizure before formal arrest cannot be excluded, it added.
The bench said that no period can be excluded while computing the deadline, except the time necessary for the journey from the place of arrest to the magistrate’s court.
