Supreme Court rules 24-hour magistrate deadline begins when liberty is curtailed, not at formal arrest

Key facts

• The Supreme Court, in a bench of Justices Ujjal Bhuyan and AS Chandurkar, ruled that the 24-hour period for producing an arrested person before a magistrate under Article 22(2) begins from the moment liberty is curtailed, not when the arrest is formally recorded.
• The court held there can be no artificial distinction between detention and arrest creating a buffer period, disapproving judgments of the Orissa High Court (Aryaman Pattanaik, 2025), Kerala High Court (Arun K Thomas, 2026) and Madras High Court (Kannan, 2025).
• The ruling arose from appeals by four persons detained on September 29, 2025 at 2 pm during a search and seizure of 11.03 kg of yaba tablets under the NDPS Act in Tripura, but formally shown as arrested only at 11 am the next day; the court held their about 18 hours of detention without judicial oversight violated Article 22(2) and warranted immediate release.
• The court directed that even a person detained for search and seizure must be produced before a magistrate within 24 hours, and any detention without warrant must be for a reasonable period, failing which the person must be released.
• Magistrates must specifically record the exact date and time from which a person's liberty was curtailed and examine whether the 24-hour constitutional deadline was observed, with only genuine journey time to the magistrate's court excludable.
• The Tripura High Court had rejected the accused's bail pleas, holding the twin conditions under Section 37 of the NDPS Act applied for commercial quantity contraband, and had also rejected their challenge under Section 36 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS).
• The court linked the safeguard to preventing custodial violence, citing the Bhagalpur blinding case as a recognised instance acknowledged in past judgments.