Holding that the 24-hour deadline runs from detention, not from the moment police formally record an arrest, the Supreme Court has called any attempt to split “detention” from “arrest” to stretch the Article 22(2) clock constitutionally unsustainable.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday ordered the immediate release of four men who were picked up during a search and seizure in Tripura at 2 PM on September 29, 2025 but shown as formally arrested only at 11 AM the next day. Holding that their 24 hours ran from the moment they were detained, it found that they had been kept for about 18 hours without any judicial oversight, in breach of Article 22(2) of the Constitution [Sujit Das v. Union of India].
A Bench of Justice Ujjal Bhuyan and Justice Atul S. Chandurkar delivered the judgment, with Justice Bhuyan pronouncing the conclusions in open court on November 5, 2026.
The conclusions as pronounced
The Court held that:
- The 24 hours under Article 22 commence from the date and time of detention, when liberty stands curtailed, and not from the time of formal arrest.
- If detention continues beyond 24 hours before production before the Magistrate, the person shall be released forthwith.
- No period other than the journey from the place of arrest to the Magistrate’s court can be excluded.
- The Orissa, Madras and Kerala High Court decisions discussed below do not lay down the correct law on Article 22(2).
- The detaining authority must also ensure that detention does not extend beyond a reasonable period within the 24 hours, in terms of Section 58 of the BNSS.
- At production, the Magistrate must record the actual date and time of detention and check compliance with the 24-hour deadline from that point; on a breach, the person shall be released forthwith.
- The Magistrate must also examine whether detention, though within 24 hours, exceeded what was reasonable, and may decline remand if satisfied that it did.
Why formal arrest is not the starting line
The Bench turned down the view that the clock starts only once an arrest is formally recorded:
“The view that 24 hours begin only from the formal arrest is contrary to the constitutional mandate of Article 22(2) and 56 of BNSS.”
The Constitution, it held, allows only one exclusion from the 24-hour period, the time needed to travel from the place of arrest to the Magistrate’s court. Time spent on inquiry or investigation before an arrest is recorded cannot be carved out:
“Article 22(2) does not sanction exclusion of the time taken for inquiry or investigation before the arresting authority could effect arrest of the detainee. This is beyond the mandate of clause (2) of Article 22. The only exception the Constitution itself provides is the time necessary for the journey from the place of arrest to the court of the magistrate.”
The Court read the words “arrested and detained in custody” in Article 22(2) as joint and conjunctive, and said the two expressions mean one and the same thing because the Constitution does not recognise any detention divorced from arrest. It also rejected the idea that a brief detention is not an arrest, holding that there can be no temporary suspension of a fundamental right.
High Court rulings that no longer stand
The Bench held that the decisions of the Orissa High Court in Aryaman Pattanaik, the Madras High Court in Kannan and the Kerala High Court in Arun K Thomas, which allowed pre-arrest detention to be excluded from the 24-hour period, do not lay down the correct law. It approved the Kerala High Court’s view in Biswajith Mandal that the clock starts when a person’s liberty is effectively curtailed.
The Court said that the dichotomy under which the 24 hours begin only after search and seizure is complete and arrest is recorded “is not only unsustainable in law but is entirely unconstitutional”. It added that a line drawn between arrest and a “short investigative” detention would leave open who decides how short is short, and that instances of custodial violence make proper judicial oversight of detention necessary.
The NDPS case that reached the Court
The appeals were against a Tripura High Court judgment refusing bail to the four accused in a case involving the alleged seizure of 11.03 kg of yaba tablets. The High Court had held that the twin conditions of Section 37 of the NDPS Act must be met in commercial quantity cases, rejected the plea based on breach of arrest procedure, and relied on State of Punjab v. Sukhwinder Singh @ Gora, which held that prolonged incarceration alone cannot override the NDPS bail restrictions.
The Supreme Court held that the four should have been produced before a Magistrate within 24 hours of 2 PM on September 29, 2025, and directed their immediate release. The allegations in the NDPS case remain to be tested at trial, the release rests on the Article 22(2) breach and not on any finding on the merits, and the accused are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
What the ruling changes for remand courts
Showing a person as “arrested” hours after police have already taken him into their control has long been used to buy time for questioning. The ruling closes that gap nationwide, including in NDPS and other special-statute cases where bail is otherwise hard to get, by making the moment liberty is curtailed the only starting point. It also puts a duty on every remand Magistrate to record when detention actually began, to release the person if the deadline was missed, and to refuse remand where even a detention within 24 hours was unreasonably long.
Case Title: Sujit Das v. Union of India [SLP (Crl) Nos. 12451-12453 of 2026]
Bench: Justice Ujjal Bhuyan and Justice Atul S. Chandurkar, Supreme Court of India
Date of Judgment: November 5, 2026
Appearances: Senior Advocate Rauf Rahim, assisted by Advocate Ali Asghar Rahim, for the appellants