The Supreme Court has brought much-needed clarity to the law governing the detention of individuals by the police. It has ruled that the 24-hour deadline for producing a detained person before a judicial magistrate begins from the moment his liberty is actually curtailed and not from the time the police formally register a case or record an arrest. The ruling strikes at a practice that allowed law enforcement agencies to circumvent a fundamental constitutional safeguard through procedural manoeuvres. The police have often resorted to a convenient stratagem: detaining a person for questioning, sometimes for hours and occasionally for days, before formally registering a case against him. The time spent in such unofficial custody was then excluded........

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